Clad in my bucket hat, saltwater dripping from day-old braids, I make Sean follow me outside for a celebratory photo. “You want a picture of the pie here?” he asks, slightly incredulous as I try to balance the melting treat on uneven gravel. It’s heavier than you’d expect. “Yes,” I reply. “My key lime pie in our keys campsite!” Later he sends the picture to his mom. She says it looks delicious—and it is. Let vacation begin. I can’t get over the view from our bed. I take entirely too many photos (Future Me will have a problem cleaning them out) trying to capture the awe—sun-bright awe—that my house is parked in a place like this. My backyard is a rocky shoreline. My kitchen rustles with an ocean breeze. My eyes can’t drink it all in. Our campsite is Scout’s dream, too. No matter where she is—claiming her yellow lawn chair, curled in the front cab, sprawled on our bed—she is immersed in fresh air. We breathe deeply, all three of us. “What a faith-in-humanity moment,” I say to Sean, finally unclenching my jaw. Shortly after we arrived at Bahia Honda State Park, an off-leash golden retriever barreled into our campsite. Sean tried to intercept while a boy looked on from the road. “Please get your dog!” I hollered, darting to my left to match the creature’s swerve. The boy’s mother appeared at a leisurely stroll. “She’s friendly! She’s really friendly,” promised this woman I’d never met (and had no reason to trust). “My dog’s been attacked before and isn’t,” I called. “Yours can’t be in our site.” The next minute blurs a little, even in such recent memory. I know I body blocked the retriever again while her owner tried to attach the leash. Finally, oversized adolescent paws scratching my thighs, we succeeded. “She’s only eight months old,” the woman said, a bit pleadingly. I felt myself flush. Scout had done well—only barked once, stayed lying down on her blanket, knew her humans would handle it—but this was not how I envisioned the start of our vacation. My voice had an edge: “That’s not an excuse.” “I’m not making excuses,” the other owner half-snarled before stomping away. “I’m sorry.” I could feel my heartbeat in my fingertips. Sean hugged me; Scout asked to play; we tried to move on. Then I realized the woman and her dog and her son were our immediate next-door neighbors. Then I realized they were also the campground hosts. Is this a bad sitcom? I texted my mom, venting frustration. It is not encouraging when the people in charge of a shared space’s rules (like, you know, keeping your dog on a leash and under control) are the very ones violating them. I buzzed with anxiety until, as Sean removed a raw neck bone from the freezer for Scout and I started thinking about our own dinner, the off-leash-neighbor-campground-host family again appeared in our site. Sans dog this time. The woman had a special treat for our heeler. Her husband offered a soft handshake. Their boy rode a bright bicycle. I’ve never received such a sincere apology—I’ve never witnessed, so clearly, the results of a stranger pausing to consider their impact after the fact. “That must have been so scary for you,” she said simply. “Thank you,” I replied, meaning it. Their dog never ran at us again. It is not uncommon for people to comment on our campsite as they walk by. They like the van’s bright color; they love when Scout curls in a lawn chair of her own. (For introverts, we certainly aren’t inconspicuous.) This morning a woman with arms of tattoos asks if our dog’s name is Macaroni. What? She clarifies with a grin: Then we could refer to her and the van, together, as “macaroni and cheese”. Sean and I burst into laughs as she walks away, equal parts bemused and delighted. “That’s near the top of the ‘best comment ever’ list,” I declare. He agrees. I have worked ahead—client work, the stuff that pays part of our bills—so I can avoid email and Webflow and Canva here on the ocean’s edge. It feels wrong to be lit by a computer screen when I could be lit by the sun. My Kindle’s glow is different. I read three books in three days: lying on our bed, sitting under blue sky, stroking Scout’s fur. I read in my head while walking to the bathroom building (a few neighbors look on, confused) and aloud to Sean while he cooks breakfast (pancakes, mostly) and under my breath as the evening colors fade. I wanted to live inside a book, wrote Ann Hood in her Morningstar memoir. How lucky I am to do just that. I am still damp with saltwater. Sand coats my feet—more determined than I after two rounds of attempted toweling—and I realize I don’t even mind that our rug is a noticeably different color than it was two months ago. This is pure luxury, I think. Lavender lotion on gently tanned skin after a day of fresh air. What more could anyone need? I choose a postcard with a cactus—Organ Pipe National Monument—even though the landscape is nothing like our current humid world. I’m drawn to the simple shapes. I want to think simple thoughts. Next to me Sean hand-solves a calculus problem his boss sent him “just for fun”. Is this balance? I sit, cross-legged, at the edge of our bed. My face meets the breeze. I can see more of the sky if I crane my neck forward, and I let my eyes adjust—I know, from two nights of sleeping with the back doors open, exactly where Orion’s belt will appear. Sean brings me decaf dark roast with whipped cream. As I lean against the foot of the bed, legs toward our pillows to ensure the best sunset view, Scout sprawls to my right. “Can you get my phone?” I call to the front of the van. “I just need the camera. To capture this moment.” This evening world is so quiet. I’m nearly done reading The Darkness Manifesto, and I’m not sure I’ve ever felt so excited for the night—for the bats, for the stars, for the sounds. For the stretching increments between “last light” and “full dark”. For my newfound ability to appreciate them. I painted my toenails when I was in Wisconsin, while my niece napped and wouldn’t ask to make her own mess with the bottle. Now the bright-orange squares peek above the water—satisfying contrast against an impossibly blue backdrop—as I float in gentle waves. I’m not sure how long I lie there. (Sean tells me I’m lucky to float; he, too dense, always sinks.) I feel dizzy when I climb back on shore, struggling to reconcile the firm sand with the water’s give. It’s not a problem. I just wade back out. Scout tries to eat the cucumbers off my eyes. How can I expect her to understand food that is not food? I laugh so hard I snort; she wags back hopefully. “You’re an idiot,” Sean and I tell her, often. The words mean so many other things: you are perfect, you bring us joy, we love you more than anything. I never want her to change. We are on this jog for a stupid reason: I saw a sculpted woman on the rocks late this morning and felt, crushingly, that I was not enough like her. Jiggly, I asserted to Sean, pointing at my triceps. He sighed. “Please don’t say ridiculous things.” But now that we’re moving—feet brushing cracked pavement, shoulders sweating in humid air—I don’t feel “jiggly” at all. I feel strong. I feel chastised. I feel so damn lucky to watch the sun dip behind the water’s edge. We detour to the sandy beach when we’re done. I sprint to the edge, trust fall in the water, nearly forget to close my eyes before diving under each wave. We stay, quietly—nothing needs to be said—until Sean is shivering and we cave to the promise of homemade ramen in the van. I eat a huge bowl. I pick my way around hermit crabs—too many to count—with a lawn chair draped over my shoulder. We are finally heading to the shallow bay we keep walking by, the one tucked along the road with a view of the old railroad bridge, for sunset. (And civil twilight. Maybe nautical and astronomical, too, if thoughts of Scout snuggling by herself don’t call us sooner to bed.) The clouds put on less of a show than they did last night—we watched yesterday’s sunset from the van’s front windshield on our way to the dump station for a gray tank emergency—but somehow the evening is still more beautiful than I imagined. I inhale. An osprey squawks, perches on the sandbar a dozen feet to our left. Each passing moment reveals a new star. I stop trying to chase my anxiety away and instead invite it to sit with us, share our snacks, sip from Sean’s thermos of decaf with cream. I sing “Of Love and Life” in my head. The song sticks with me all night, even after we’ve waded back to shore (without stepping on a single sea creature) and crept to camp in the dark. I sing it to Sean and Scout as we pile atop each other in bed. “Hear me out, take your time, watch the setting sunTake your hands out of your pockets, feel the water runDon't worry about tomorrowAnd yesterday is gone” Sometimes a stranger’s poetry seems written just for you. Sean and I walk through the small restaurant’s door. Old-school entrée photos obscure the walls, captioned in Spanish; I feel a bit sheepish when the cooks’ replace their background chatter with “do you need an English menu?” as we reach the front of the line. It’s a glorious day: pure sun, eighty degrees, shallow blue-green ocean on each side of the highway. Melancholy laced the morning as I thought about leaving the keys. We’ll be back soon (an incredible delight) but I’ve always struggled with endings—even the simple ones. All that messiness dissipates with my first bite of tamale. We pass our Cuban coffee back and forth across the picnic table, Sean’s gentle grin—the soft one, the one that reminds me of his shyer college self—igniting my own. After this we have more local cafes to visit as we make our way toward Homestead (where home for the night will be a dingy Cra
