Finding a Place in the Sun

Following a lengthy operation to repair our 6 month-old baby daughter's broken heart, her dad and I took her to my parents' new place in Florida - a dock's length away from the ocean. We needed to rest, to let half a year's anxiety and vigilance drain away. I had slept on the floor by her crib, dropped heart medicine into her mouth like a mother bird, my senses attuned to the slightest change in her breathing. We hadn't even dared to hope.

Within days of luxuriating in balmy sunshine Katherine's previously gaunt little face with its pale bluish tinge blossomed into bountiful cheeks flushed with healthy pink color - the sort of cheeks that elicited exclamations of delight from strangers in supermarkets.

I held my daughter against my heart as we basked like sea animals in the pool. Her blue eyes sparkled under the yellow sunflower of a sun hat. She grew chins. She sprouted a tooth.

"I don't think that baby's mother would want her to be in the pool," a dour observer remarked.

"I am the baby's mother, and she loves it!" I said, twirling my daughter like a baby seal.

Her dad and I lay on the beach while Katherine sat beneath a beach umbrella gumming rattles and grinning.

At 11th months old, she wobbled in her grandparents' living room from chair to coffee table to couch. She raced in circles on the springy spongy green turf a year later. We picked strawberries with my father. 

When my parents gave endless streams of cocktail parties, Katherine hid beneath the square stone coffee table in a little blue smocked dress and red sandals, reached a hand up to filch cooked shrimp.

"Hurry up! Scat! Go!" she ordered, when my mother lingered too long saying good-bye.

Once, when her brother Will was about 4, we drove down from Vermont. To distract her brother, Katherine read the entire "Goosebumps" series aloud. 

"Keep reading!" Will and I demanded, when she paused for breath.

Over 32 years we've seen dolphins, herons tall as toddlers, miles of fish flipping and dying in the sun from strange tides; we've searched for gold doubloons following a tropical depression that carved away sections of sand dunes; we've spied sea turtle eggs, gathered shells, made mermaids' purses from seaweed. We've jumped the waves holding hands and squealing. We've watched the Space Shuttle, felt the earth tremble, stopped our ears against its mighty roar. We've breakfasted with Mickey. We've balked at Space Mountain.

There was the time when delectable orange blossom perfume wafted in through the car windows as we approached Indian River County.

"Welcome to Florida," I told my daughter.

"This isn't Florida," she stated.

"Why, yes it is, Sweetie," her dad and I laughed. "See - palm trees, orange groves..."

She shook her head.

Only when we pulled up in front of her grandparents' place did she agree. She crossed her 7 or 8 year-old arms, leaned back, and announced, "Now, THIS is Florida." 

And not everybody's Florida, to be sure. Not most people's.

*

In about a month, this daughter and her husband will be having their first child, known fondly to us all as it swims in its mother's womb as "Baby C." My aspiration is for Katherine and her family to find their own place where new experiences and memories will blend and tumble and roll like surf.