Family traditions

I had a homework assignment for the week—Will’s class at school has a new theme for May: “The Glow Worm Family Traditions.” I have a meeting (of course) the day that Will’s family tradition is scheduled, so since I can’t go, I had to write a description for them to read instead. I can’t write it in any voice but my own, so I don’t know how they’ll read it, but for what it’s worth, here’s my homework (very originally titled).

One of Our Family Traditions

Every year in the summer we spend vacations with our family at Georgetown, South Carolina. Usually my parents are there—Grandma Netta and Papa Teddy—and my brother and his wife, Uncle Matt and Aunt Shari; they both have houses just down the road from each other on Catfish Lane. Often my uncle and his family will be there too. We go down for weekends in the summer pretty often and always for about a week at the Fourth of July.

The Fourth is always fun—that night we ride the boat down Six-Mile Creek to Black River and then to Winyah Bay just outside the Georgetown Harbor. We’ll take bubbles in the boat and hold the wand up in the air as we ride to the Harbor—the bubbles stream behind us. When we get there, we’ll sit in lawn chairs on my father’s pontoon waiting for the fireworks to start, but they’re always late, so it gets darker and darker while the boat rocks back and forth at anchor. Finally the fireworks will start, and the display always lasts a long time—you can see them so clearly from the water, with none of the smoke or lights or mosquitoes on land that interfere, and reflecting on the surface too. On the way home, it’s always cold from riding in the boat in the dark and wind, so we bundle up in blankets. William usually falls asleep on my lap afterwards.

That week we take the boat to the sandbar in one of the bends in the Black River, where you can stand in the middle of the river—although William is still too short even at low tide to walk on the bottom. We swim at the sandbar and sometimes eat watermelon there. Of course you have to watch out for the little shrimp that will jump on you while you swim—surprise! At low tide we also play in the boat ramp; Will and Laura love to try to catch minnows and fiddler crabs. Will likes to throw sticks out into the creek for Ginger, my parents’ labrador, to fetch. She will chase those sticks all day. If it’s the right time of year, the kids will chase those giant grasshoppers—the ones that are three and four inches long. My brother won a most-unusual-pet contest with one of those grasshoppers one year when we were little.

I usually take Laura and Will to the beach one day too while Chris goes kayaking. I try to time our beach trips to low tide because Will’s afraid of the ocean still. We’ll go to Huntington Beach State Park where the tide pools stay on the beach at low tide—Will can actually sit in the pool like it’s a bathtub, and they’re full of little minnows and sometimes even big starfish. We’ll walk down the beach and pick up shells—although Will prefers chasing seagulls—and before we go home we usually walk down the beach to Atalaya, the Huntington’s old home. Huntington Beach is the only place I know where you can see a Spanish-style castle in the South, although it’s a very small one. The rooms are arranged one after another along four long halls that run in a square with a courtyard in the middle. Laura and Will run down the halls from room to room yelling to hear the echo.

Although it is nice to get the sand washed out of everything, it’s always hard to come home afterwards—we never spend as much time outside here as we do down at the coast. Sometimes I think the time we spend at Georgetown will be some of the most memorable events our children have when they grow up, between the alligators and fiddler crabs and whatnot. We’ll see.