It has one floor with a kitchen that is part of a larger room, and off of this large room with its big table and rocking chairs and its soft old couch and armchair and miles of booklined shelves are three bedrooms. Our house has no upstairs like the houses of my friends. I love the bedroom I share with my sister.
Who would think having to leave the ocean for most of the year is a better way to live? How could we not live well, the five of us together? I love our house. A poet with no money can still live very well, my mother reminds us, and I do not know why. No one else lives year-round on the beach but us. We run to help her bring things back to the house. She is finished gathering and her baskets are heavy. “Jane, Maya, Hershel, Max,” calls my mother. Like the silvery lace curtains of my bedroom being drawn from my window, letting in light, so the moon gently pulls back the layers of the year, leaving the best part open and free. Out past my childhood, out past the ghosts, out past the breakwater of the stars. Out past the planets, far away from Uranus and the edge of our solar system, into the brilliantly lit dark where the things we don’t know about yet reside. It is the beginning of July and we have two months to live out the long, nurturing days, watching the geese and the saltwater swans and the tides as they are today, slipping out, out, out as the moon pulls the other three seasons far away wherever it takes things. It is warm enough to lie here in the little silty puddles like bathwater left in the tub after the plug has been pulled. My mother is gathering food for dinner: clams and mussels and the sharply salty greens that grow by the shore. There in the long eelgrass, like birds’ eggs waiting to be hatched, my brothers and sister and I sit, grasses higher than our heads, arms and legs like thicker versions of the grass waving in the wind, looking up at the blue washed sky.
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