Breathing Room

My gardening book calls fall a “shoulder season.” It’s a season of in-betweens. Here in Southern California, it is not the branches so much as the beaches that start to go bare. The fiery orange of fall is not in our leaves, not yet. Here, autumn blazes in bonfires littering the shore more sparsely week by week.

Our days still burn hot at 90 degrees, but the evenings are cool now, so the heat from our fire is welcome. We cozy up to flames, hands clasped around mugs of cocoa and spiced cider, clinging to the idea of a change of seasons as we dig bare toes into the sand. 

Our kids are roasting marshmallows to squish into smores. A bonfire is a sacred moment for kids. They approach the fire with reverence, basking in the permission to be in such close quarters with the illicit. The light flickers across faces of delight. They revel in the sticky sweetness of these moments - the rareness of these treats, their fascination with the fire, perfecting their techniques for roasting and assembling. 

I watch with joy, too, even though the price of these moments is wiping sticky faces and vacuuming car seats, sucking out the sand that hitched a ride like unwelcome party favors. Someone offers me a marshmallow, but I wave it away. For me, it is enough to watch, to observe my kids pass through this right of passage at summer’s end, to watch the flames as they dance. Not just oranges, but yellows and red, and a hint of blue towards the center. That center, I notice, is open space. Heat and oxygen surround the kindling. It’s that space that keeps the fire burning. 

The kids’ delight turns to indignance as my clean cloth seeks out stickiness, sugar gone wrong.  The whiteness of marshmallow goes gray and their sweet, smooth skin goes rough as sand sticks all over. They return to roasting like tiny kings back to the business of ruling after an interruption dealing with the serving staff. 

I reach for my phone to capture these moments. Just for a picture, I say to myself. Then, I’ll put it right away. A notification slides across the screen as I adjust the lighting. Urgency swells. I’ll just check this one. I can feel the gravity of this black hole, its pull on my attention a force outside myself. So many moments sucked into its depths. 

So many gifts emerge from this tiny Pandora’s box. This screen opens up worlds to me, guides me to new destinations, paves the way to connections, bonds of friendship and professional connections. 

“Mommy, my stomach hurts from all those s’mores!”

I click the screen to black. There can be too much of a good thing. 

In the morning, my hair will smell like this bonfire, but it won’t be the magical smell of a dwindling summer. Just the stale leftovers of excitement gone by. A little hand grasps my fingers, tugging me back to the present. (Children have a knack for that, don’t they?). My son leads me down close to the water, bending low to touch the water and sucking it off his fingers. Chocolate and salt pair well together, even to his toddler’s palette. This would make a great picture moment, I think. But my phone is back at the fire. There is no screen to mediate this memory. The moment will have to be enough. 

There will never be enough of these moments, I think. No matter how many we get, I will always want to devour them. 

It feels like time to walk back when suddenly my daughter surprises us, slipping her hand into my open one. My hands are full now, as strangers are fond of remarking as they pass our family. “So is my heart,” I like to reply. 

And it is full. Sometimes, it’s full of moments like these, when I savor tiny, delicate fingers in mine, our toes hidden in sand as we sink down deep together. Sometimes, it’s full of whining and screaming and all those undesirable behaviors that draw the attention of strangers who remark on the fullness of my hands. No matter how many moments I commit to my heart, it never seems at capacity. Overflowing, maybe. But always, there’s space for more. 

So we stand here in the twilight a little longer, watching the waves ebb and flow, steadying each other as they pass. I hold tightly to their hands. It’s beautiful, even magical, here at the ocean’s edge. I can hold onto them for now, but someday they’ll be swimming on their own. How will I keep them safe then? What will stop them from being drawn out into the open blackness?

It’s a wild and wonderful thing, this ocean. But too much of a good thing can swallow you whole. 

We trudge back to the fire, the prickling of the seawater stinging my legs. The sky is almost completely black now. The flames shudder in the breeze. Our fire has served us well tonight, here in the place we’ve built for it. It’s the perfect captive, offering us warmth and an anchor for our memories. 

We snuff it out with a bucketful of sand. It is the perfect captive, but if we let it loose, it could consume us. So we stifle it. We steal away its in between; the oxygen is where it burns. Like us, it needs the in between to keep breathing. 

“Let’s get dark chocolate next time,” my daughter suggests. “When it’s all so sweet, it isn’t any good.”

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This post is part of a blog hop with Exhale—an online community of women pursuing creativity alongside motherhood, led by the writing team behind Coffee + Crumbs. Click HERE to view the next post in this series "Unexpected Joy".

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