I’m sweeping up a pile of sand from the hardwood floor. It’s everywhere. Under each throw mat and area rug. In the corners of the room and hiding beneath the wicker chair nearest the front door. In the folds of the couch and the crevice of the doorjamb. As I sweep, I begin to gently cry. Big fat tears hitting my cheeks, rolling down my collarbone. I’m taken aback. The spool of emotion wound tightly inside of my chest unfurling. My mind is a carousel of slides from this summer and those before it. Sunburns and oyster roasts. Dock jumping and line casting. Shell hunting and minnow trapping. Drip castles. Crab pots. A seahorse we caught in a bucket once to observe and set free; I had no idea how delicate, how magnificent they were, until I watched one in the wild. Its tail looping and winding in the water, propelling itself, strangely enough at a perfect gallop, with grace and strength far beyond its stature. It felt so intimate, spending time with this near-mythical creature, before releasing it back to its wild and watery home.

The guest cottage at my in-law’s house is more of a glorified walk-up apartment. The detached garage on their sprawling, wooded property is topped by a small living space just perfect for our family of three. A living area, kitchen and bedroom. A bathroom and a laundry we’ve converted into a makeshift hideout for our son, his twin bed tucked into the corner creating an alleyway to the door.  My husband, son and I have taken to spending our summer months there and relish the salt and sand. Together watching our son’s hair turn from blonde to blonder to nearly white with the sun’s hot bleach.

During the pandemic, when our son was only three, his preschool closed and my husband’s job transitioned to a fully remote workday. My in-laws generously offered to “pod up” with us and invited us to spend as much time as we needed together with them at the river. “The Rivah” as locals like to say, is the closest thing central Virginia has to a beach without traveling to the larger coastal cities. It’s quaint and rural, with ramshackle farm stands and wide fields of soybeans. Local soft crabs fill plates and bellies during season and Hanover tomatoes are sold roadside for sandwiches thick with mayonnaise on doughy white bread.

That first spring and summer of 2020, when we decided to safely quarantine ourselves in hopes of staying isolated enough to continue to visit my in-laws, was a tough one. How do you explain a global pandemic to someone who is only three years old? Someone who only really understands that a germ made his teacher, his classroom and his friends simply vanish. How can my husband continue to further his career, manage a team and heck, maintain his own sanity, from a tiny bedroom we now call an office in the upstairs of our home? How can I possibly teach our child, entertain him, stay quiet enough not to disturb the work of my husband, cook, clean, write, and not go quietly insane? Or even loudly so? Our answer was, The Rivah.

And so, we began a quiet love affair with this place. The hilly drive over bridges and roadways whisking us from downtown to countryside. The thick, brackish air and the heady scent of ripe oyster baskets. The sleepy, purple dusks and the fiery morning horizon, a sky rose gold, dripping diamonds to rest atop the water. We became fishermen. Baiting hooks with bloodworm, fumbling as we learned to avoid their spray. Whooping with joy at croaker, spot, flounder and the occasional rockfish. We became marine biologists as we watched schools of porpoise leap around us, showing off and laughing their hearty cackles. We became geologists marveling at the colorful sediment and craggy rocks and fossils we found in shell fragments. We became gastronomists learning to shuck and slurp oysters fresh from my father-in-law’s harvest. Baskets brimming with sweet, briny mollusks and the occasional pea crab. We became water sports enthusiasts, learning side by side to kayak and paddleboard. Flailing and falling until balance and rhythm took over, rewarding us for our hard work.

And so, I cried. Because this was the third summer since our pandemic panic first drove us to this place and now, our son is six. Now, we’re fast on our kayaks. It’s been seasons since anyone has tipped over. We could shuck oysters with our eyes closed, slugging them back under the shade of the carport. Fresh, juicy lemon slices stinging the scrapes on our hands left from the craggy shells. We can bait a hook in seconds flat, flicking our wrists to feel the sinker and know instinctively if it’s yet hit bottom. We’ve seen schools of skates and bay nettles by the bushel, spade fish nibbling algae slicked dock posts and ospreys teaching fledglings to fly. Did you know the same pairs come back to the same nests each year? Ours are named Ozzie and Harriet.

I wasn’t crying at the passage of time. Not exactly. And I certainly wasn’t crying because this will be our last summer. But it will be the last time that this particular one comes around. She was beautiful and fickle and now she’s gone. Each summer is different and each summer is new. Each summer greets me as both a stranger and an old friend at the same time.

I know there is a future summer. One that looks nothing like the last but dressed the same. She’s winking at me knowingly as I walk down the dock, craning my neck to see our son on the horizon. Alone on his kayak now, seeking adventure far from my watchful eye. I know there is a future summer where my husband and I aren’t paddle boarding together because our knees hurt and sitting just seems so much nicer today, don’t you think? I know there is a future summer where the whole family of aunts, uncles, cousins, brothers and sisters won’t gather for an entire week of it together in this place because of kids and jobs and obligations and distance and time. A summer where my mother-in-law isn’t sitting next to me, beachside, giving me all the latest gossip or regaling me with details of her neighbors’ rigmarole. Laughing together into our cans of beer until she spills hers, waving it off. Her tell that she’s letting herself relax in that envious carefree manner she has. A summer where I’m under the umbrella’s cool shade rather than basking in the day’s hot, harsh rays because I’m too mottled and too wizened to trust the sun any longer.

And I’ll remember. I’ll remember what it was like to wake up with the sunrise, glints of light refracting off of water and plunging into the bedroom through the slatted blinds. I’ll remember that I blinkingly opened my eyes to find our son wedged tightly in between my husband and myself. His two middle fingers plugged firmly in his mouth, his own version of thumb sucking. His hair wild, damp with sweat. His eyelids fluttering under long lashes, deep in sleep and dream. I’ll remember casting my eyes up to catch my husband’s as we both lay still so we don’t wake our little boy, still recovering from the previous day’s adventures. My husband’s eyes turning upwards and his smile flashing at me just over top of that precious boy’s head. Two parents basking in a moment of pure bliss. One that will serve as just a blink in the timeline of our lives but one whose depth and essence somehow makes it to the marrow of our bones. The type of thing that only two parents can share. That only a husband and wife remember. Creating that sameness that happens over time. Two people becoming more and more like the other as age creeps in and shared history envelops their lives. It’s entirely ordinary and wholly extraordinary all at once.

And as I look ahead, I know those mysterious, yet-to-be-met future summers will have their beauty.  Because maybe there are lifelong friends alongside us, laughing at the stories we have all told time after time. And maybe there are friends who travel along with my child, languishing over long and longer days that turn into bonfire blazoned nights. Maybe then a girlfriend. A wife. Maybe there are fat little grandbabies with sandy toes digging into my dimpled thighs, cooing into my neck on the shady place under the dock as I sway them on my hip in that rhythmic way no mother ever forgets.

Time is both a thief and a gift. And I devour each summer hungrily, as if it were a ripe peach. Until the pit of it stops me in my tracks turning to grit in my mouth. There might not always be my sandy haired son running to me with fistfuls of beach treasure. There might not always be my body, proud and lithe on the low tide sandbars casting long shadows into the channel. There might not always be my husband’s lean strength, and seemingly boundless energy hoisting beach chairs and boating equipment up over his shoulders to carry for us all in one fell swoop. But there will always be summer. Summers so precious in my memory they feel like I’ve stolen them. And in truth, I have. Because they never really belonged to me after all. They are lightning bugs in the fields of phragmite. Floating past as I try to capture them, laughingly blinking at my desperation to hold them in my hands. To keep them in a jar. But I’ll keep stealing my summers. Keep watching their ebbs and flows, a tidal drumbeat ringing in my memory. I’ll keep stealing them, just to let them go.

Lauren Dunn is a writer and part time strategic communicator. After kicking off her career in the Washington, DC area, marrying and starting a family, she looked to Richmond, Va. for a change of pace and space to plant roots. A Virginia native, Dunn lives in Richmond with her husband and seven-year-old son. Lauren’s writing has been featured in Motherly, Her View from Home, and most recently, The Huffington Post. Lauren’s love of literature began as a child and continued through her education at Radford University. Keeping prolific journals from a young age, Lauren uses writing to process her experiences and environment, trying her best to make sense of this utterly nonsensical, sometimes confounding, but always entertaining life.