No day at the beach

No Day at the beach

 

The wind blew steadily all afternoon hammering the top of the dunes in a full court press scattering the sand haphazardly into the blue sky to the west. She dusted once then twice, and then threw the rag onto the table. She once read that ninety percent of the dust in a house is from human skin; “Yeah right, she said,” thinking to herself she could never keep this place clean enough for him. When she sat down the weather channel was describing the nor’easter building up seven hundred miles away. A foolhardy fully buffeted and parka clad reported on the pier described the beach as being covered in globs of sea foam. Almost as if someone had overdone their washer with soap; she had done that before. He told her when she left he would be thinking about her all day and hoped that when he got home later; they could talk. At this point that was hardly worth waiting for. He had his ways and she had his ways ingrained in her head.  Two sides with only one side isn’t much of a discussion. She may as well be that weather man, lamenting for sunny thoughts. Not on a beach that looked like abandoned fair grounds littered with pieces of joy from the night before. Bags of cotton candy, naked sticks no longer tethered to balloons long ago raised to the sky to the terror and glee of children and twenty years gone by of I love you. Her relationship with him felt like that; lots of bits and pieces of a happy past that had somehow gotten covered by sticky memories of the not so good. The displaced salt spray from the foaming ocean dripped small drops of sated water onto the coffee table before her.