Edisto

This semester I am taking a Creative Nonfiction class with the most difficult Creative Writing teacher here at Anderson University. What I thought was going to be a class full of terror and crushed dreams has become my favorite class this semester. Our teacher, though challenging, has helped me to see the world through brand new eyes. She has shown all of us that we have a story to tell, and she has helped us learn how to tell it. Below is one of the first pieces I wrote. It is still pretty rough, but I like it because it describes a place I love dearly.

1/29/2014

Hold Tight

​All it takes is an aroma: coffee, sunscreen or a salty breeze. As soon as I smell it, I am back to that place where I long to be. People call it Edisto beach, but to me, it is the rustle of wind in the palmetto fronds as they scrape dryly against each other. To me, it is the slap, slap of the small waves against the crushed shells that make up the sand. To me, it is piping of little birds from where they hide amongst the swaying sea oats. To me, it is home.

​I smell that coffee and I feel myself in the yellow bed of the old, white beach house, my father waking me at 5am to go see the sunrise at the easternmost part of the island. He holds in his hand a mug of what he calls “coffee-milk”: more milk than coffee, so that my mom will allow us to have it. My sleepy brothers and I drag blankets to the car and watch the palmetto trees speed by as my father drives through the silent island to the beach, where we set up rickety chairs and sit, expectant, as the sun rises. The sand is soft beneath my bare feet, and cold, still untouched by the new sun’s rays. The dawn comes at last, just as we were about to fall asleep again, and rewards us for our wait by a glorious array of new sunshine.  ​

Later, we return to the house for a breakfast of hash and grits, and maybe some shrimp if the boys caught any the day before. As soon as the food is gone, we slap sunscreen hastily on our young, pale bodies and head down the sandy path that slopes to the pounding sea. As we run, the sand underfoot changes from powder-soft to hard, wet, and closely packed. Here and there are little holes where sand crabs lurk, always eluding our clumsy childish fingers. Mounds of sand in the sea oats show where a mother Loggerhead turtle has laid her nest. There are little orange flags surrounding the nest where the kindly turtle-watchers placed flags of warning: warning children like us that we must not bother the baby turtles. We don’t dream of disturbing the nest, the turtles belong here as much as we do; they love this beach as well. Gulls hover above us as we play, floating on gyres of air, hoping for a crumb; we throw sand instead, and they fly away, disappointed.

​The sea sparkles in the sun, even though it is a brownish-green color, and not the blue that we see in the advertisements for Florida beaches. Edisto beach is near the river and muddy, but it is our beach. A cry goes up from one of my blonde brothers: a porpoise pod has been sighted. We rush to the water and the creatures dip up and down, first in the sea, then in the sunshine, oblivious of the delight their arrival has occasioned. The porpoises leave, and soon the sun departs as well. As a last farewell, she paints the sky with a riot of flaming color, stronger than the colors she showed us during the dawn. We feel her dying heat on our backs as we troop up the sandy path to the weather-beaten gray boards of the porch and inside, where the carpet is rough beneath our feet, sand ingrained forever in its fibers. Later, clean, but somehow still sandy, we take turns on our grandfather’s scout binoculars and watch gulls swoop down on a shrimp-boat far out on the twilight water. We go to bed soon after the sun, snuggling down into sheets that smell like the rest of the house: sunscreen, sand and salt. My room is dark, but a little red light blinks on the smoke alarm attached to the paneled ceiling. I watch its eternal blink and eventually close my eyes, the sound of the distant surf still pounding in my ears.