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The last summer I saw Uncle Chester at Beaches 20, I was nineteen. He was eighty-three. The cottage had been sold that spring—his knees could no longer manage the dune stairs—but he insisted on one more visit. “Just for the day,” he said. We drove down together, just the two of us, in his rattling Ford pickup. The beach was empty except for a single family building a sandcastle far down the shore. Uncle Chester sat in his chair, and I sat beside him. For a long time, neither of us spoke. Then he pointed to the horizon and said, “You see how the light lies flat on the water? That’s the hour when the dead come back.” I thought he was being poetic. He was not. “My brother,” he said. “My first dog. My best friend from the war. And soon, me. But you—you keep coming back here. Promise me.”
Beaches 20 was not a resort. There were no boardwalks, no neon signs, no arcades throwing pixelated light onto rain-slicked pavement. Instead, there were miles of gray-gold sand, interrupted only by drifts of seaweed and the occasional horseshoe crab shell, upturned like a helmet from a forgotten war. The water was bracingly cold even in July. Fog could roll in by lunchtime and stay until supper, muffling the world into a white cocoon. Yet it was ours. Uncle Chester guarded it with a quiet ferocity. “You don’t tame a beach,” he’d say, squinting into the horizon. “You borrow it for a while. Then you give it back.” Uncle Chester Us Beaches 20
I promised.
In the arithmetic of the heart, twenty is the number of years it took me to realize that Uncle Chester was not teaching us about beaches at all. He was teaching us about time—how to stand before its vast, indifferent ocean and not look away. How to borrow a stretch of shore, love it fiercely, and then, when your knees give out, hand it to the next person who will sit in the canvas chair and watch the waves. The last summer I saw Uncle Chester at
As the years passed, the “us” in “Uncle Chester, Us, and Beaches 20” began to change. Cousins grew too cool for family vacations. Grandparents stopped coming. My own parents, once young and laughing in the surf, began to move more slowly, preferring the shade of an umbrella to the shock of the waves. But I never missed a summer. And Uncle Chester never changed—or so I told myself. In truth, he was changing the way the bluff behind his cottage was changing: imperceptibly, then all at once. His hands, always calloused, began to shake when he poured his coffee. His stories, once crisp as a gull’s cry, looped and wandered. “Just for the day,” he said
So here I am, twenty years old, writing this from a blanket on the same patch of sand. The wind is cool. The gulls are crying. And somewhere, in the flat light lying on the water, I believe Uncle Chester is keeping his promise, too—watching over Beaches 20 until the rest of us return.