Convinced that she was born from the sun, I watched my mom move fluidly through the heat. Compared to my own lethargic movements through the foreign humidity, I was convinced my mom had been sculpted by the rays that remained strange to me. Her short, big blonde curls shone in the sun’s afternoon light, reflecting the image of the sun. She stood at a short 5’4” but as I looked up at her from my spot next to her on the ground, she seemed to reach the sky above us. I believed she was limitless like any kid does. The North Carolina summer was the uncomfortable stickiness your bare thighs get when you get into the car and it’s so hot the leather covering the seats is being cooked for the dozenth time in its existence, but for my mother the North Carolina summer was the closest thing you could get to parents and cousins who had long since been estranged. Despite the way the leather burned and stuck to our thighs, we sat on the hot seats anyway, windows rolled all the way down and the wind combing through our hair with its invisible fingers, making our identical curls somehow frizzier than they already were. We arrived at the dock windblown and drawn by an inherent urge to the ocean.
Commanding the small boat was my mom’s older brother, Arnie, a retired professional surfer with a never-ending supply of stories from the good old days. He was one of the many half siblings she had and one of the few with whom she shared an inseparable bond, forged in the southern heat of many childhood summers spent on the beach. They remained as close as the sand that clung permanently to your hair days after being swallowed up and spit out by the ocean’s graceful yet furiously relentless waves. Standing well over six feet, he permanently towered over my mom and made sure she knew it. My mom laughed along with him, a warm, deep laugh that silenced every other sound around me. One so rare and genuine it could never help but demand my unbreakable attention. A laugh so sweet it raised me to smile at the sound of it breaking the hard surface of the air that existed between everything. I reveled in the warmth of my mother’s voice and the rebirth of life that the summer sun brought with it. Uncle Arnie sped us off onto the water, breaking the calm with his ingrained knowledge of the sea. Refusing to reference the map my mom held still through the havoc he was wreaking on the sea, meeting every wave head on with the hull of our boat, Uncle Arnie led us— fearless.
We found what we were looking for far from the harbor we sped away from and the hoards of boats that littered the view of the horizon. A sandbar, untouched by outside life, seemed to have been waiting for us patiently and greeted us with familiar waters. We anchored ship and waded through the sun-warmed, shallow water carrying lunch and towels, carefully maneuvering around hermit crabs and snails that had attempted to bury themselves in the sand. Within minutes on shore, my mom assumed her natural position stretched out on a towel in the sun. Her face was tilted towards the rays and a small smile rested permanently on her lips. I took to wading through the sandbar, picking up any signs of life to examine and identify. Almost every find fell outside of my New York range of knowledge. Foreign crabs and snails in unknown shells warranted a mad dash from the water to my mom’s towel, where my silhouette blocked the sun and the fresh ocean dripped onto her skin as I held out the unknown creature to her, waiting in suspense for her answer. “That’s an olive snail,” my mom said, holding it familiarly in her hand and running her fingertips gently over its smooth exterior. “You’ve found a really beautiful patterned one, they’re usually one solid color.” Each inquiry always ended in the same, “Don’t forget to put it back where you found it,” as she handed it back to me. “Make sure it gets home safely.”
I always gave her my word it would be returned safely just as soon as I’d brought it to Uncle Arnie for further investigation. After my mom had had enough of the sun she awaited for so long, she joined me on my gentle hunt through the wild sandbar, walking alongside me and putting an arm out in front of me to warn me every time I was about to step on an unseen creature she had been trained through childhood summers of roaming freely to detect. Our close inquiries to each creature held our undivided attention through the rise and slight fall of the sun, marking the early afternoon. Only when our ears greeted the thick, lazy southern accent of my uncle’s call for lunch did we realize time had escaped us, and our attention broke from the hunt we were on. We feasted on sandwiches that had unavoidably been dusted with sand from our beach and dried ourselves off in the sun. Full and lazy, I sprawled out in the sun next to my mom, imitating the way she lay in the sun. I closed my eyes and tilted my head up towards the sun, and I couldn’t help the small smile that had found its way onto my lips. My mom lay next to me holding our favorite book, A Wrinkle in Time. She read it out loud to me for what was probably the twentieth time, using the funny voices only she could make, distinguishing each character and giving them a new personality with every voice. Before long the sun had fallen even farther and my uncle knew we had overstayed our welcome at the sandbar. The rising tide threatened to envelop us along with our beach, so we said goodbye and waded back to our boat. On the ride home my mom sat out in the dying rays of the sun, her head tilted upward and a small smile playing at her lips; it remained long after the sun had set.
In New York my mom quietly invited me into the kitchen, a small smile playing at her lips, and rubbed vanilla from the cabinet on my wrists and behind my ears in the early hours before school with the sun creeping out of the horizon. She rubbed some on her wrists too, then smelled her wrists and smiled at the scent. I watched as she relished in a small moment before holding her wrists out in front of my nose for me to smell. “My mom used to use vanilla as a perfume,” she said, speaking of the grandmother I never got to meet, the parent she doesn’t talk about. “This smell reminds me of her.”
My mom talked of her father, the pilot who married her mother at eighteen and left less than a year later. She spoke of him as the one leaving a trail of families behind at every layover, ex-wives, and kids scattered across Alaska, Washington, and Maryland. This grandfather I know well, a proud Irish descendant with a thin, graying ginger braid that reaches all the way down his back. His gelled handlebar mustache scratched my cheek with every hug, yet with an entire country between us, these feelings were foreign. I always watched my mom dodge his calls, making up a lame excuse to any witness, and it seemed like these things were foreign to her, too.
I followed her lead and smiled, letting the vanilla cloud my vision before I left the dark kitchen. Her voice was always rich with coffee when she sent me off to elementary school in the morning, wrapping me up in a warm kind of embrace. It had always soured by the time she got home at night along with the vanilla on our wrists. The cold in New York stripped the trees of their color, leaving them bare and exposed. The short days dimmed the sun too early, and the cold seeped into our bones a little too easily. The dull rays of the sun didn’t reach my mom through the bitter cold. Her neglected sun-kissed curls started displaying newfound gray hairs dispersed throughout each gold lock.
I stood on a stool in the kitchen with my mom after she had come home from work, towering over the pot full of tomato sauce that held my undivided attention. The savory aroma of garlic bread in the oven filled the air and my taste buds watered with the thought of it. She read directions from her illegible handwritten tomato sauce recipe absentmindedly, ingredients getting lost from her mind to her mouth as if the words had started to disappear from the paper while she was reading them. My questions of confusion about measurements missed her ears, and our communication got lost in her silent hunt for words and mine for the right questions to reach her. We finished dinner, like an uncoordinated hand moving without the help of eyes in the dark, and sat around my father and my sister, wrapped in their own conversation as vibrant as my mom’s food. My mom and I were outsiders looking in on their conversation, she laughing quietly to herself, unheard in the conversation, and I observing my mom, hoping for clues to figure her out.
Later that night when she tucked me into bed, I asked her to read to me from A Wrinkle in Time. She sighed and lowered herself onto the edge of my bed, picking up the book and thumbing through it like a book she’d been dreading to read. She picked a page at random and started to read; her voice was monotone as her eyes traced the words on the page slowly, struggling to get them all into the air. I begged her to do the voices, to say the words the right way. She sighed for a second time. “Not tonight, I’m too tired.” She put the book back down as if relieved of a burden and turned off my light. The sun had set and she had stopped smiling hours before that.