Seabrook.

Last summer, in a weak moment of melodramatic sentimentalism, I rushed out onto the sunny sands of my island shores with an empty coke bottle in my hands and proceeded to fill it up with the kind of golden sand you see in postcards. I packed the bottle away and carted it over several oceans to stand it on my Seattle windowsill to remind me that beaches exist in the world still. Because America has beaches…beautiful beaches even, where the imagination can run wild and the sea spray plays with your hair and clothes…but they’re not beaches-beaches, you know?

And then I went to Seabrook this weekend…and not only were there blue waves and pretty sea cottages, but also miles and miles of the kind of golden sand you see in post cards. Enough to fill a million coke bottles with no additional fear of being blacklisted at customs for bringing illegal foreign materials into the country. And so nostalgia died a sheepish death.

Seabrook, for those who don’t know (and I didn’t until I got there), is a little sea-side village of sorts, on the Washington coast and I got to mill around its picturesque locale with the Bulthuis family for four days.

After the most dramatic and draining house hunt of all time (all’s well that end’s well, fear not), it was a marvelous thing to get away from Seattle for a little while with this wonderful family and put things back in perspective.

We lived in a little house called “I’ll fly away” and I got to be roommates with this little miss:

I learned that reading Noah’s Ark is always more fun in whispers and preferably after 11:00 pm, birds trump anything else in creation and also that mornings are best.

We biked on old-fashioned bicycles and built sand castles, we read and talked and played rounds upon rounds of Dominion (which has maybe become my new favorite game). Calvin has become my new crossword cohort and Jenny and I decided it would be worthwhile to invest a morning in teaching Bjorn and Markus how to play badminton. We even let them win.

The one glitch was the Great Throwup that swept the masses, kind of like the Great Plague except for the part where it didn’t kill people. It spontaneously picked one person at a time to banish to the Realms of Sick for twenty-four hours at a time, during which the said person would suffer the re-tasting of any food he or she chose to consume during the previous twenty-four hours. It was really quite efficient and got through seven people in the course of four days…so far Markus and Peter are the only ones who remain standing strong.

Friday, Saturday and Sunday therefore were spent with fluctuating numbers at any given activity but then Monday – with its beautiful weather and prime beach time – saw everyone well and happy and we spent a perfect day by the sea.

To swim in the ocean again was glorious. There are few things I love better than a romp in the waves - a refreshing one in this case (cold, freezing and/or invigorating are also adjectives of choice depending on ones view on life) - and salty hair and tingly skin.

To the kinds of weekends that get people through the winter.