A Tale of Two Summers

Last summer opened with a good bit of trepidation; in the midst of the pandemic, we brooded about not being able to travel far, worried about what was safe and what was not, and lamented the disruption of cherished summer traditions. As we approached this summer of 2021, conversely, things were looking up: the kids had made it through a strange school year, our family was fully vaccinated, and it felt like we’d return to a carefree summer of freewheeling fun.  

Now, as we enter these waning weeks of the summer (I know it’s only early August, but I always feel that whoosh of time flying when I turn the calendar from July to August), it seems that the tale of these two summers wasn’t quite what we expected it to be. This summer, it turns out, wasn’t better than last summer – or worse. It was just different.

Despite the pandemic – or maybe, in some strange way, because of it – our summer of 2020 was pretty great. Yes, it was weird to eschew cookouts and gatherings. We were bummed to not fit in a trip to Cape Cod with my folks, and even more disappointed to miss the usual visits from far-away cousins. We missed the spring soccer season that spills into summer. We missed family sessions of mini golf. We missed impromptu trips to – well, anywhere, really.

By necessity, we embraced local wonders more than ever. And one of the huge perks of the summer of 2020 was that all our local friends were here; nobody was traipsing off for a week at the beach, trips out west or abroad, or time away at summer camp. Instead, we’d gather by our favorite swimming holes late in the afternoons, the kids splashing around and jumping off rocks and downed trees, the moms soaking up the sun and catching up. We refurbished forgotten mountain bike trails in the woods by our house and created a couple new ones. We paddled around in kayaks, looking for turtles and sliding into the water to cool off.

And through the month of July, the kids and I hiked. Sometimes it was just the four of us on the trail, but often one group or another of our hiking friends joined us. From the first day of the month to the last, we crossed eight of the state’s 48 4,000-footers off our list. We even added a couple of overnights – my kids’ first ever backpacking adventures, and my first in a good long while.

This summer, though, we’ve hit the trail only a few times. I don’t know that we’ve had a single lazy afternoon by the river with friends. And the kayaks have been loaded into the truck and slipped into the water only one time so far.

The start to our summer was partly consumed by the tail end of a competitive spring soccer season of busy weekends. The two teenagers in the family started their first jobs in June, which made spontaneous hikes and river trips and anything else nearly impossible. The weather has been weird. And fitting in hiking trips or other outings with friends has proved difficult, with other teenagers working and other families taking vacations at different times.

Instead, this July opened – very happily so – with a visit from my California brother and his family and wrapped up with a visit from the Tennessee contingent. There was tons of cousin time, late nights of visiting and kids running around, and short visits from more extended family thrown into the mix. These cousin visits are among my children’s most cherished summertime traditions, made even sweeter this year by last year’s hiatus.

Another summer tradition returning this year: our pilgrimage to the sandy shores of Cape Cod and the beaches my brothers and I visited when we were kids. Summer may be fading faster than I’d like. But I’ll get my toes in the sand before it goes. 

Original content published by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul. This essay appears as Meghan's August 5, 2021 Close to Home column in the Littleton Record.

Cousins

For as many summers as my children can remember, their California cousins have flown east from their suburban home across the country to the relative wilds of northern New England. The arrival of the California cousins – or the Tennessee cousins or the Texas cousins – is an eagerly anticipated event, one the kids talk about for weeks beforehand.

NH & TN cousins, many years ago

My mother, who is an only child, often says she doesn’t fully grasp the relationship between siblings, even after having raised three of them. I feel the same way about cousins. Considering both my parents come from Irish-Catholic families (and each has dozens of cousins), it seems incredible that I only have three first cousins.

I love my cousins dearly, but I’m stuck age-wise between them and their kids. We had regular family gatherings when I was growing up, but the age gap meant we weren’t running around together playing capture the flag or giggling like crazy over nothing much, which is what my kids spent much of the middle of July doing.

This year we met the California crew on Cape Cod – two families with kids ranging in age from 9 to 16 years, a pair of grandparents, and another aunt and uncle thrown into the mix – for a week of beach time. We returned home to New Hampshire to find my husband’s Texas cousins and their kids visiting, which meant a happy continuation of cousin fun.

The cousin bond is special – not quite sibling, but different than friend. Maybe it is the novelty of only seeing each other once a year (or less often), or a sense of familial loyalty, or that they share some of the same stories. Whatever the reasons, the kids fall into the relationship each visit as if it’s the most natural thing in the world.

In past years, when the California cousins are on the East Coast, the kids have established a regular list of things to do – hiking Bald Knob, kayaking Long Pond and looking for crayfish and salamanders, toasting marshmallows at the backyard firepit and watching fireflies flit through the summer night.

This year, we got to introduce the California crew to some of our favorite haunts on Cape Cod, where we’ve gone for a week each of the past eight summers. We visited old favorite beaches and explored new ones. We played mini golf in one of our regular (and not so busy) places and checked out a new course down the road from where we were staying.

We got ice cream at the same place my family did when my brothers and I were children and watched the kids run around on the beach we played on when we were little. We even found a new candy store to substitute for the annual cousins visit to Chutters.

From our rental house at the Cape, the kids could tramp down to the beach whenever they felt like it. They usually paired up – one New Hampshire kid, one California kid – in a revolving mix of personalities and activities. My kids look up to their older cousins, all teenagers now, and the older kids seem to appreciate the chance to do kid stuff for a week with a slightly younger crew – and no other teenagers to impress.

The timing of this year’s cousin visits from various corners of the country meant that bidding a melancholy adieu to the California crew was quickly followed by happy anticipation of hanging with the Texas contingent. Before we’d even walked through the door back home, the kids were clamoring to see their Texas cousins, who have visited the past few years.

Forget recovering from vacation, we jumped back in to communal dinners with 20 people – including 10 kids ranging from baby to 13 years old. There were impromptu soccer matches and rounds of hide-and-seek and other made up games. The kids piled into the pickup truck to drive through the field and visit the neighboring cows. There was plenty of general goofing around.

With all the kids growing older, I’m not sure how many more years of week-long summer visits we’ll have. But I know my kids will remember fondly these wild weeks of cousin fun well beyond childhood. 

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted to her blog, Writings From a Full Life. This essay also appears as Meghan's Close to Home column in the July 27, 2018 issue of the Littleton Record.

June Swoon

If there ever was a June I was ready for school to get out, it was this one. I’m not quite sure why I was so eager for summer this year. Probably it’s a combination of Morning Rush Fatigue, Too Much on the Schedule, and Overtired Kids. We were all ready for a change of scenery and routine.

Mostly, though, I think it’s that I know these seasons when my children will be unencumbered by summer jobs, and when they will still want to spend lots of time hanging out with each other and with me, are rapidly dwindling.

After the rush of end-of-school-year activities, it was nice last week to turn the page on the daytimer and see lots of open space. No games or sports practices (but plenty of time to play in the yard), no classes (but lots of room for imagining and dreaming up home science experiments), no concerts or homework or obligatory appointments.

There are a few items and deadlines penciled in here and there, but we have a week or two of mostly unscheduled time before jumping into summer plans, and I am hoping to be able to shape my work time around family and play time during these school-less weeks that seem always to fly right by.

The kids – in their youthful rush to grow up – may not know how fleeting these sweet days of childhood summer are, but they do know the season is short. They haven’t wasted a moment getting to the fun.

In the first week of summer vacation, they’ve shared a short hike to a semisecret place with friends, basked in the smoky glow of a backyard fire, paddled kayaks along a river, played with friends, and jumped into the rain-refreshed Ham Branch.

The kids have also taken to sleeping in – allowing me precious extra time in the early mornings – and wandering downstairs just in time to watch the day’s first World Cup soccer game. Meals happen when we are hungry, rather than when the clock suggests it’s time to eat. Bedtime has blurred beyond the point of distinction.

Next week we will again adopt some semblance of a daily family schedule, but on a summer scale. There will still be plenty of time for going with the flow, between our summer’s bigger plans: the annual trip to the Cape – this year with West Coast cousins who have never been there – an extended hiking trip with friends, and other plans that range from tackling a few more 4,000 footers and riding bikes through wooded trails to jumping into the river on hot afternoons and impromptu outings for ice cream.

Somewhere in between, I’ll have deadlines to meet and chores to tackle, but I’m striving for that sweet summer balance between meeting obligations and savoring these long days that pass so quickly.

In the meantime, I’m enjoying waking to the strong sunlight and raucous birdsong of summer’s early mornings, the colors of the garden (despite the weeds), the laughter (and, yes, sometimes squabbling) of my children playing in the yard and splashing in the water, fireflies and thunderstorms, and falling asleep to a chorus of frogs singing from the pond and barred owls calling to each other across the just-dark sky.

Ahh, summer, thank goodness you’re here.

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted to her blog, Writings From a Full Life. This essay also appears as Meghan's Close to Home column in the June 8, 2018 issue of the Littleton Record.

Countdown to Summer

The countdown to summer vacation is on at my house, and it is on in earnest. Maybe it is because May slid into June through a near-constant string of sunshine. Or because the California cousins will be here before my New Hampshire kids are even done with the school year. Perhaps it’s that my two 3^rd graders spent several spring days mired in standardized testing, which can cause even the most ardent of students to bemoan school.

Whatever the reason, this year my kids have known exactly how many school days are left at any given time for the past few weeks. We’re almost there. A few more days. And here, on the cusp of summer, the anticipatory promise of all the good things that season should be is nearly overwhelming.

We’ve had an early taste of some of our favorite summer things already. A few years ago it snowed Memorial Day Weekend, and the kids built a snowman beneath the newly unfurled leaves of the maple trees in the front yard. This year, Memorial Day Weekend was a sweltering tease of the approaching season, and we took full advantage, packing a load of pre-summer fun into three little days. We did a quick loop up our favorite short hike, joined a friend posse to cool off at Echo Lake, and took our first dip of the year in the Ham Branch.

Since then we’ve added trips to the tennis court, pedaled through our family’s favorite bike ride, and opened our mini-golf season. We have broken out popsicles and ice cream on the front porch. The lawn has been mowed several times. The fire pit is ready for s’mores and socializing. The garden is in – mostly, anyway – and I can almost taste those first delicious peas, even though they’re still a few weeks away.

And that is, perhaps, the impetus behind the countdown to summer: sweet anticipation of what we know is to come. Afternoons at the pool or the river. Feet in the sand at the beach or the dirt in the garden. Hikes up a few taller mountains, perhaps, or exploring new bike trails through the woods. Impromptu soccer games in the front yard. The rush of cooling air from soaring through back-and-forth arcs on the backyard swings. The twinkling magic of a million fireflies flickering through the field and of a gazillion stars overhead.

With all of these things on the horizon, the two summer events my kids say they’re most looking forward to are The Cousins and The Cape.

The first crew of cousins arrives from California during my kids’ last week of school. There are certain traditions we share with them during each annual visit – a hike up Bald Knob, a paddle around Long Pond, trips to the river my brothers and I cooled off in when we were kids, evenings by a backyard fire. The second set of cousins comes from Tennessee later in the summer, instigating gatherings with the other side of the family – and lots more fun.

The other most-highly anticipated week of the summer is our annual pilgrimage to Cape Cod. This will be the fifth year my children have journeyed from the quiet mountains of home to the crowded beaches of the Cape. During those years we have settled into favorite beaches, ice cream haunts, and mini golf courses. It helps, of course, to have friends who live down the street and are happy to play tour guide for the week we are there, ferrying us to places only the locals know. Each year we find at least one new place to explore.

That trip, though, is still many weeks in the future, many summer experiences down the road. For now, the full promise of summer sits just out of reach. It will be here soon enough. A few more days of reluctant early mornings and the confines of school days. A few more days to cross off the calendar. The countdown is on; summer will be here in 3-2-1.

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted to her Blog: Writings From a Full Life. This essay also appears as Meghan's Close to Home column in the June 10, 2016 edition of the Littleton Record.

Extra Baggage

Traveling to new places, whether down the road or a long airplane ride away, is something I have always loved. Packing is another (not so loved) story. In my 20s I perfected the art of traveling light – a summer of backpacking in Europe, impromptu camping trips out west, and a 6-month stint in Ireland with only one (very large) suitcase.

These days I don’t wander so far or so often, nor do I travel so lightly. My excursions now tend to include an entourage of three children and all of their – and my – stuff. I wonder what my minimalist 20-something self would think of all the bags we carry.

One summer, while I was in college, I spent three weeks living out of a backpack. That was a glorious three weeks during which I visited Paris, Nice, Rome, Florence, Salzburg, and Innsbruck. I went to art museums and cathedrals, tossed foreign coins into famous fountains, ate perfect croissants and creamy gelato, and climbed mountains in two different countries – all in the same four t-shirts, three pairs of shorts, and one wool sweater.

I thought I was pretty suave to be traveling so light. But throughout my backpacking journey, I met seriously light travelers: people – mostly Australians and New Zealanders – who had been backpacking around Europe and beyond for months, sometimes longer than a year, each with only one worn pack.

Just after turning 27 I packed my bags – one very large suitcase and a much smaller carry-on – and headed from the Colorado mountains to the west of Ireland for six months. The suitcase was temporarily lost somewhere between Denver International Airport and Shannon, Ireland, so I lived for four days with the clothes I had on and one partial extra set I’d thrown into the carry-on.

Contrast that to our first family vacation, which was a mere week at a lake in the wilds of Wayne, Maine. My youngest was a baby that summer, and the older two still in diapers. The back row of seats in the minivan was folded flat, and we filled that space to brimming with Tonka dump trucks, water toys, sleeping bags, floaty tubes for the lake. And enough diapers for three kids to last a week

We’ve since moved the summer vacation to Cape Cod. Luckily my parents go with us, because we need two vehicles to transport all that stuff: sand toys and books and favorite stuffed animals and a week’s worth of food staples and snacks. But no diapers, thank goodness. Last summer we also went to visit friends on the coast of Maine for a quick overnight, and I swear we packed nearly the same amount as we would have for a week away.

Last week we embarked on our first family expedition involving airplane travel – a whole new adventure in going places. Yes, this winter-loving family flew south for a week, lamenting leaving the all that great snow to other skiers, but relishing the chance to feel some summer-like warmth during an exceedingly cold winter.

In true mom fashion, I had the kids’ warm weather clothing pulled from winter storage and packed neatly into their new suitcases several days before our trip. My own bag, on the other hand, I grabbed the morning of departure and filled helter-skelter with wrinkled shorts and a couple of sundresses, flip-flops and bathing suits, and my youngest child’s purple stuffed unicorn, which took up a good quarter of my large bag and without which, she claims, she cannot sleep.

Maybe this change in my packing savvy has something to do with having children. Or with being out of practice. Or with there being too much space in the suitcase. Whatever the reason, I’m pretty sure the traveling, and the experiences we have along the way, are more important than the bags we carry.

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted to her Blog: Writings From a Full Life. This essay also appears as Meghan's Close to Home column in the February 27, 2015 edition of the Littleton Record.

Picking Berries

"Can I eat them all?” my 5-year-old asked, staring at a large bowl of wild blueberries we’d plucked from low bushes along the side of a local road. When it comes to berries, this little girl is insatiable, and I

can’t blame her. After all, wild berries picked fresh from the vine or the bush are one of the great joys of summer.

Over the past few years, my family has a built a respectable list of secret and not-so-secret berry stashes: a thick patch of blueberries hidden amid the tangled brush of the southeast field, swaths of thorny blackberry bushes growing through the old apple orchard, and clusters of wild raspberries woven along the tumbledown, fern-ensconced stone wall at the far edge of the front yard.

If one berry spot is lacking, we move on hopefully to the next – the roadside pick where we found the blueberries my youngest was ready to devour last week, or the patch of raspberry bushes at the corner of our road, or the blackberry brambles at the edge of the woods in the front field. So far, our best crop this summer has been the raspberries growing through the thick hedge of rosa rugosa along the curve of our driveway.

“Berries!” called the littlest one (again) as we drove out one morning. I brushed off her claim at first, figuring she must have seen the rusty swell of rosehips within the prickly foliage. But she was persistent (as she often is), so I threw the minivan into reverse to check it out. Sure enough, the first pinky-red raspberries of the summer hung there amid the thorny rosebushes like tiny treasures. I picked the few I could reach and divvied them up between us.

That was weeks ago, and my daughter continues to visit that spot several times each day, reaching through the double thorns of  rose bushes and raspberry canes for each sweet prize, and beseeching the taller members of the family to pluck the berries that hang tantalizingly just beyond her reach.

I spent many a girlhood afternoon myself, once upon a time, scrambling through brambles to reach the berries that grew along the road near home. The scratches along bare arms and legs were a small price for the simple pleasure of wild berries eaten on the spot or saved for breakfast the next morning.

During college, I spent a summer in Ireland, studying history and literature and traveling around. While musing and wandering one day along a quiet lane just outside the village that had been home to my great-grandparents, I made the happy discovery of big, juicy blackberries growing in the roadside hedge. Their sun-warmed sweetness and the casual waves of passing strangers reminded me of home.

This summer, too, we have managed to find wild berries in our travels. During a visit with friends in Maine, we picked our way through some of that state’s famous wild blueberry bushes, located conveniently off the back porch. What the littlest one did not eat by the handful, we saved for breakfast the next morning. On our annual trek to Cape Cod, we discovered a small patch of blackberries just down the road from where we were staying. My children exclaimed at the find and spent 10 happy minutes plucking a colander full of plump berries, enough to last the week.

Closer to home, my children and husband and I keep watch on the berries each summer, looking first for the blossoms, then the bumpy green of unripe berries, and finally the succulence of the tiny, tasty treasures we’ve waited for. Then we set to picking.

While the kids prefer to grab blackberries and raspberries on the fly, before moving on to one of summer’s other distractions, my favorite to pick are the blueberries, tiny and low to the ground – and thornless. It is something like meditative therapy to crouch down in a quiet field and mindlessly plop small berries into a pail until it is full.

Each summer we bake our cache of wild berries into crumbles and muffins, blend them into smoothies, condense them into jam, pour them over pancakes, and package the leftovers neatly into the freezer for later. By far the best way to eat a wild berry, though, is fresh off the bush or the vine, juicy with sunshine, brimming with the sweetness of summer and good memories of past berry picking adventures.

Original content by Meghan McCarthyMcPhaul, posted to her Blog: Writings From a Full Life. This essay also appears in the August 8, 2014 edition of the Littleton Record.

A year's worth of memories

Amid the tree trimming, letters to Santa, cookie making, and present wrapping madness of the holidays, I take a trip each year down memory lane, perusing photographs from the past 12 months in the process of creating photo calendars for family members.

It is a fun ritual to look through the photos of the past year, deciding which to include in each calendar, and remembering some of the things we’ve seen and done. A year’s worth of photographs stretches from winter outings into springtime mud puddles, summer fun, the colors and activities of fall, and back to winter again. Around we go.

Every photograph offers a glimpse into one moment of time, and each one evokes emotions and memories. Every image comprises a story, or at least the introduction to a story. Of course, the moments we photograph and save are generally the happy ones, whether big events or impromptu clicks of the camera during good times. In this way, we commemorate the joyful and proud moments and ignore the less-than-cheery events.

Looking through photo files of the year gone by takes me quite a while, as I become sidetracked by the details I’ve already forgotten, things that would likely fade from memory without those images to hold them: the happy-and-a-little-bit-nervous smiles of the first day of school, giggling walks through the lupine field, spontaneous living room dance parties.

Contained in the 2013 collection are a summer week on Cape Cod, an autumn trek to Montreal, visits from the cousins from Tennessee and California, a wedding celebration, and plenty more: bike rides, hikes, holiday festivities, jumping into leaf piles, skiing through snowy glades, the intricacies of constructing fairy houses and decorating the Christmas tree.

Looking beyond the most recent set of photographs to images from years past, I remember my children’s toothless baby grins, how crazy the littlest one’s hair was when she was tiny, the furrowed brow my son often wore as an infant, and that the sweet-bordering-on-mischievous gleam in my eldest daughter’s eyes is the same now as it was in her earliest months.

I remember how my children, as toddlers, loaded freshly harvested carrots and potatoes into their Tonka trucks and carted them from the garden to the house, the springtime bouquets of bright dandelions they picked, their first snow angels, my then-2-year-old son teaching his baby sister to crawl, that baby’s first bike ride without training wheels, how grown up my daughter seemed in the costume for her first dance recital.

In photographs I see that some of the outings my family enjoys now are similar to the adventures I had as a kid. I have a picture of myself around age 6 helping my father build something, and one of my son at the same age wielding a hammer with his grandfather. I have a photograph of the pigtailed little girl I was sitting at the top of a hike with my mom, and one of my own two daughters in nearly the same spot with her a few decades later.

Around and around we go.

The kids will clamor to flip through the new calendars when they arrive, before we wrap them up and put them under the tree, remembering together some of the fun of the year just passed. They also love looking through the older calendars and the baby books, finding within the pages their smaller selves and remembering the stories contained in these photographs.

As the year comes to a close, the 2013 calendar will join the small stack of calendars from previous years, which we’ll dig out of the closet every now and then, flipping through the memories. And before the 2014 calendar is unwrapped and hung on the wall, we’ll have begun taking the next round of pictures, creating new stories as a new year glistens on the holiday horizon.

So the world turns. Around and around we go, snapping photographs, holding onto moments, and replaying memories along the way.

Original content, posted by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul and posted to her Blog: Writings From A Full Life. This essay also appears as Meghan's Close to Home column in the December 13, 2013 edition of the Littleton Record.

Vacationland

For the past 17 years I have lived in places where other people vacation – a tiny town surrounded by tall peaks in Colorado, then a seashore village in the west of Ireland, and finally settled into the White Mountains of New Hampshire. For many years I did tourism-based work: waitressing, guiding horse treks, retail jobs in ski stores and gift shops. And like most anybody who lives in Vacationland, I have occasionally been frustrated by visitors who drive too slowly while looking at the view or ask questions bordering on the absurd (“At what elevation do the deer turn to elk?” is among my favorites).

It was a refreshing role reversal, then, to travel to another Vacationland last week, exchanging the quiet mountains of home for the sandy beaches, busy ice cream shops, and whimsical mini-golf courses of Cape Cod. Here, I became the rubbernecking, out-of-town driver, peering first to the landscape of the sea and salt marshes, then to the perfectly picturesque Cape houses with their neat cedar shingles and hydrangea hedges ranging in hue from pale pink to cornflower blue and deep purple.

On the Cape in summertime, it seems the tourists outnumber the locals, but it’s easy to pick out the houses where year-round residents live. There are nameplates on the doors, sprinklers set on timers to water small lawns in the wee hours, plastic-wrapped Cape Cod Times tossed onto driveways each morning, and neat fences containing backyards with patios and swing sets.

At our home in New Hampshire, surrounded by an untamed apple orchard and wild berry brambles, we are regularly visited by moose, deer, and bear – the wildlife tourists to the area often hope to see. The week before our Cape Cod vacation we had one bear, looking for some discarded cooking grease, spend a bit too much time a bit too close to the house. We’ve also had bear cubs in the sandbox and a juvenile moose in the perennial garden.

By these large animals, my children are unfazed. But the small, lightening quick eastern cottontails of Cape Cod were fascinating. We looked for – and often found – them everywhere: the mini golf course, the back yard, on the way to the beach, on evening walks through the neighborhood. Each glimpse of brown ears and fluffy white tail elicited gleeful exclamations of “Bunny!”

An even bigger treat was the seals we spotted in the waves off Monomoy Island, where we happily traveled with friends who have a boat. The seals seemed as curious about us as we were about them, their round, black heads staring at us from the shallow water before ducking into the ocean and popping up again a few waves over.

Wading through tide pools, the kids found hermit crabs, a starfish, huge snails, mermaid’s purses, rocks in all sizes and colors and rubbed smooth by the ocean, and more shells than would fit in their plastic buckets. These things may be as common to Cape Codders as bear and moose sightings are to us, but for my New Hampshire kids, the treasures of the sea are new and wonderful and will be remembered fondly until our next visit.

This was our third annual trek to Cape Cod, and it’s become a week my children look forward to all year. For them, it’s a chance to sleep in bunk beds, play in the waves, and go for a boat ride or two. For me it’s a cherished family tradition and happy change of pace. Salt water and sea breezes are good for the soul, in the same way that clear mountain air and vistas are, or paddling along a lake where loons sound their wild cry and sunlight glints off quiet water.

No matter where you find Vacationland, a change of scenery and break in routine can be refreshing, invigorating, recharging. I count myself lucky to live in a place where a breath of fresh air is available any time from the front porch, the windows frame a stellar mountain view each day, and you’re more likely to be delayed talking with a neighbor at the post office than stuck in a traffic jam.

Still, it’s nice, sometimes, to get out of town. It was a joy to spend a week at the beach. And it was a blessing to return to the mountains, a Vacationland for many, but simply home to me.

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul and posted to her Blog: Writings from a full life. This essay also appears in the Aug. 9, 2013 edition of the Record-Littleton.

Summer's treasures

On the windowsill above our kitchen sink are a heart-shaped stone from the river and a small bouquet of wildflowers, both gathered by small hands not far from our front door. These are summer’s treasures, and gentle reminders – as I’m doing the dishes, making meals, or sorting mail – of the joyful, fleeting magic of both summer and childhood.

The rock came home from a recent visit to the Ham Branch of the Gale River, where my husband and children took the dog for a quick after-dinner dip and brief respite from last week’s heavy heat. No matter how many toys a child has, it seems the simplest things are the most amusing, and rocks are high on the list. This one, gray and bumpy and fist-sized, became a treasure because of its shape and my 4-year-old’s recent fascination with hearts.

Fresh wildflowers appear regularly in our home and change with the evolving season. The small vase that holds them, an old spice jar, is filled in spring with the bursting yellow of dandelions until the variety of summer blooms through the fields. Now we have yarrow and purple clover, birdsfoot trefoil, daisies, and wild black-eyed Susans.

My son noticed a swath of daisies in a part of the field we can’t see from the house while out mowing with my husband the other day. So, as the heat waned in the late afternoon, we all headed down the grassy path cut through the field to see the wildflowers. Along the way we discovered another of summer’s treasures – wild blueberries.

We have lived in this house for nine summers, and last year was the first we found blueberries. Now that we know they are there, we find the low bushes everywhere. We discovered this year’s first blueberries the same day we picked our first peas from the garden and ate them, sweet and small and warm, straight from the pods. Both the berries and the peas are little, and it takes a good bit of effort to gather just one bite. But, oh, what a bite it is!

On shelves throughout our home, there are treasures from other summers in other places – rocks etched with small fossils, found during a climb on Treasury Mountain near my former home in Crested Butte, Colorado; sparkling white chunks of quartz from an old mine near there; jars of seashells from Cape Cod; a bent mountain bike chain ring that recalls a fun and challenging ride; a small gray stone rubbed smooth by the ocean and picked up along a beach in the west of Ireland.

Winter’s treasures of rosy cheeks, crisp snow angels, and flying ski runs down a mountain are harder to hold inside a house, just as the colors of autumn fade too quickly, and spring’s emergent green grows soon into full-fledged summer. But summer’s treasures are collectible and happy reminders in colder, drearier days that the sun always shines eventually.

This summer is young still, and many of its treasures yet to be discovered, collected, enjoyed. But summer passes quickly in a splash of the pool or the river, a week at the beach, the sounds of laughter in the sunshine. Most of the blueberries in the field now are still green, offering the promise of many pints to pick in the weeks to come. The peas are among the garden’s first gift in this hot, wet summer, and we’re looking forward to harvesting other vegetables growing there, slowly it seems (and enjoying the farmers’ market in the meantime).

Some of the treasures we gather in this season will fade – the fresh lettuce, the clamor of birdsong in morning, the wildflowers in the jar, the sun-browned skin on our faces. Others will keep awhile. We’ll fill the freezer with the extra bounty from the garden and the field – plump blackberries, blanched green vegetables, and zippy basil pesto. A few more treasures will land on shelves and windowsills. In our hearts and memories we hold a bit of every season – fall’s color, winter’s invigorating chill, spring’s awakening, and the treasures of summer.

Original content by Meghan McCarthyMcPhaul, published on her Blog: Writings from a full life. This essay also appears in the July 12, 2013 edition of the Record-Littleton.

Cape Cod Memories

With the exception of the six months I spent living by the sea in the west of Ireland, I have always been a mountain girl. It took me to adulthood to realize (like so many other things) that I need to be within sight or, better yet, touch of tall mountains to maintain my emotional wellbeing. But that half a year I spent wandering the small, quiet beach in a small, quiet Connemara town, plus a week at the beach each summer of my childhood, have also inspired a love of and reverence for the ocean.

And so it was a joy to explore the beaches of my childhood with my own children last week, at the summer mecca that is Cape Cod.

Here, the beaches teem with sun seekers and sand lovers. The roads to the beach are many and filled with cars. Ice cream shops, pizza parlors and seafood restaurants, and stores hawking all nature of small colorful rafts and plastic knickknacks pop up regularly. Cedar shingled houses fill postage stamp lots everywhere. This is not the sea of the West of Ireland, with its beaches nearly empty of people, dolphins leaping through the dark water off the shore, and solitary fishermen rowing long curraghs out to check lobster pots – the idyllic and useful sea that tugs at my soul.

But on Cape Cod, amid all the hubbub, are the beaches of my childhood, when my family would spend a week at a friend’s house, walking down the sandy lane and ducking through a hedge of beach roses to reach the nearest swath of shore.

The return to the Cape, after a long absence and with my own children, was a replay of memories and the making of new ones, with new characters and changed roles. The parents of 30 years ago are now happy grandparents, holding on to the small hands of new swimmers. The carefree child of that time now the watchful mother, orchestrating lunch on the beach and sandcastle construction. The delight of children at the beach – skipping through waves, scooping handfuls of shells into bright buckets, chasing seagulls – is the same, though the faces have changed.

My children basked in a week of tiptoeing through seaweed and discovering hermit crabs and horseshoe crabs and sand crabs, returning to our cottage each afternoon with sand in their bathing suits and hair, the salty-thick air of the shore clinging to skin and filling noses. They played mini golf, nudging turquoise and yellow and fuchsia balls through tiny lighthouse doors and under windmills. They spit out the salt water of the sea when waves trespassed too far and savored the sweetness of ice cream at a place called Sundae School, my own childhood haunt. They took boat rides with old friends to quiet beaches that disappear when the tide rises and looked for lighthouses rising from rocky outcrops.

A Cape Cod friend gave my mother a card that reads “Once you get Cape Cod sand in your shoes, you will always return.” We have come home to our mountains, inadvertently and inevitably carrying Cape sand in our shoes, the car, our bags. Along with the sand, my children have carried home buckets of seashells from the seashore, picking up each newly discovered shell as if it is the most wonderful, most beautiful, most unique of all the millions gathered in long piles on the beach. I hope they also carry in their hearts good memories of the sea and all the joys of childhood summers at the ocean.