Memory is a large wicker basket, tan, shining in the sun, filled with clean startlingly white blouses scented by the wind.You pull one out ,shake it and hold it to your chest and remember.This happened today after a lovely cyber friend posted a picture of a group of women dancing on a beach in Fort Lauderdale in the 1940s.
One day settles on my mind as if I drove home yesterday from Jones Beach on Long Island.
It was early September in 1961and my high school friends and I all have scarves around our heads in this black and white picture of mine, so it must have been a blowy day.The beach was empty, so perhaps it was a during the week.I know that the sea ,the glorious Atlantic, felt warm on our legs after the months of summer sun.
Did we have a radio or did we just dance to tunes we sang out at the top of our lungs?How to describe the joy,the freedom we felt, the lifting laughter that seemed to have no end.These girls of sun and beach are lost to me now.One went into the convent, much to our dismay, and died young.Maureen, who was kind and true.Carol, dark hair and dark eyes, very smart, could not be found by the 50th reunion committee a few years ago although she is thought to live in Maryland.I had to try to find her as well.Oh, to hear that voice again.I think of her incredible humor:the lift of her eyebrow could send us into uncontrollable laughter. Blonde athletic Mary Lou passed away from breast cancer a few years back.She was so angry at that disease that as a radiologist she had found in so many scans.The last was my beautiful, blonde best friend Patti.She is alive, well and retired in Texas.We speak occasionally on the phone and always end the conversation in tears.I'm not sure why.
This memory has no end.Soon I will pass it on to a new friend who I have never met but who shared a picture that turned over the basket.She would have fit in nicely on that day, that beach.
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