Counting them all

A little essay for you that's a love story, too

May 20, 2024

I spent a recent weekend snugged into a house that’s snugged into a hill that’s snugged into a town that’s snugged into a small curve of the Oregon coast. I was there with my husband, Cane, to celebrate our wedding anniversary.

Before our trip, when I mentioned to a secretary at his school that we were going away for our anniversary, she asked how long we’d been together.

“It’s our third anniversary,” I said.

“But how long have you been together?” she asked.

“Oh,” I said, hesitating. “I’m not sure.”

She looked puzzled.

“I mean, we were colleagues, then teaching partners, then friends. Then good friends…” My voice trailed off as I considered how to answer.

“How long have you been kissing?” she said. “That’s when you start counting.”

I did some calculating. “I guess 16 years?” I remember our first kiss, but I’m not sure if I’d count it as the beginning of us as an us.

“But, there were some years in the middle with no kissing,” I said, admitting the real reason for my hesitation. Although we had definitely been an us, living together and renovating a house and helping each other through our children’s most difficult moments, there came a time we separated, a time when we released ourselves from earlier promises and agreements.

How do we count our years? I wondered.

“We were still in each other’s lives, though,” I added. “He never stopped being my best friend.”

“Oh, just count them all, then,” she said.

I discovered the town in the late 80’s, in an old-fashioned way: by getting lost in a Volkswagen camper van. My first husband and I were on route to a different place on the coast when we followed a road and made a turn and stumbled into what felt like hidden treasure, a jewel box of a village we’d never have discovered if we’d stayed on Highway 101. It was a mix of homes and cabins in a town with only one restaurant, one cafe, and two stretches of beach connected by a tunnel through a massive rock.

Later, we returned to spend a weekend celebrating our anniversary in one of a row of old, small cabins that had been built long before we were born. We made love on a bad mattress, ate takeout on an old formica table, ran with our Labrador puppy in cold October winds, and marveled at how good it felt to be there together in that dumpy place. The weekend reminded me of what was good between us, after a summer in which that had been hard for me to remember. Half a year after that, when I was unraveling our young marriage but didn’t yet understand that it was already more a tangle of string than a garment I could still wear, I spent some days there alone in the cabin we’d stayed in together, trying to figure out what was happening. I thought the answers would simply appear while I took long walks on the sand or wrote in a notebook while sitting at the same table we’d been so happy at together, looking out the window with a clear view to the water.

They didn’t.

I ended the marriage not long after that, but my love of the town remained. I was dismayed when, a few years later, a developer built a phalanx of identical luxury townhomes on a cape at the top of the road that loops around it. I hated the whole idea of them, but when friends of my second husband—15 years older than me and catalyst to the end of my first marriage—bought one of the properties, we spent a weekend there with his children from his first marriage. We had been trying unsuccessfully to make a child of our own, and a drugstore kit told us I was ovulating the day we arrived. We had quick, mechanistic sex in a cold, well-appointed room while his children ran on the deck outside our bedroom window, banging on the walls.

A few years later, the bluff on which the development was built began to split apart, threatening the homes there. A Los Angeles Times article from 1998, the year our children were born, tells the story, including testimony from locals who weren’t surprised:

“Those of us who lived here knew this was going to happen,” said the 20-year Oceanside resident who didn’t want to give her name. “We feel sorry for those people, but they didn’t do their homework. They got hooked into the charm of the salesman.”1

Oh, haven’t we all, at one time or another?

Some townhomes eventually tumbled down the cliff. By the time my second marriage, too, fell apart, what was left of the development had been abandoned.

It was 2014 before I returned. By then I was with Cane (after the first kissing and before the separating), and when he wanted to take his mother, visiting from Louisiana, to the beach, I suggested my favorite coastal town as a good destination. I found a woodsy cabin-house high on the hill, not too far from the doomed development. I arranged the stay through emails with the house’s owner, who shared that he was a teacher and his wife was an artist, and that the house had been hand-built by his family.

The house was charming, lovely, and clearly well-loved. Unpainted walls, floors, and ceilings surrounded us, and the spaces within were filled with art, books, rustic, built-in furniture, and colorful wool rugs. We walked down the hill and strolled barefoot on firm sand under clear August skies. We picked our way through the dark tunnel in the rock, blinking as we emerged into a bright cove on the other side. Cane’s mother cooked his favorite fried chicken and potato salad, and we all sat at the kitchen table and licked oily salt from our fingers while looking out to waves and trees.

On our anniversary weekend, I woke up Saturday morning to the sound of rain washing the roof, knowing and not caring that it was going to fall all day. As I lay in the loft’s bed, anything I could see that wasn’t wood was window, and everything outside the windows was either tree, water, or sky. It felt like staying in a tree house. It felt like a hug. It felt like being with an old friend.

Like us and all of our old friends, though, the house was showing signs of age. For music, we found a boombox with a stack of CDs from the 90’s—kd lang, Mariah Carey, Lucinda Williams, Joni Mitchell. The books lining the ledge behind the built-in couch were the same ones I remembered from our first trip, and their spines were blanched and cracked. The kitchen cabinets’ doors were worn bare around their knobs, one window was sealed with duct tape, and streaks from water leaks ran down some walls. Years of sun had muted the colors of every pillow, cushion, and rug.

Stays are no longer arranged through the owner; now, rentals are managed by a company you’ve probably seen ads for. That change, in combination with the others we saw, made me suspect loss of one kind or another. Before we left on Sunday morning I googled the name of the owner I’d first corresponded with and learned that he died in 2018, too early into a rich, vibrant life dedicated to teaching and the arts. So much about the house—as it was in 2014 and again in 2024—suddenly made much more sense.

Like our bodies, houses keep the score.

And yet…we still loved the house, maybe more than we did during our first charmed stay. We loved the constant birdsong outside the kitchen window (never mind that it came from birds nesting inside a hole in the house’s exterior wall). We loved the one-legged gull who perched on the deck’s railing and stared at us while we ate an indoor picnic of cheese, olives, and wine. We loved the built-in furniture’s scars and worn cushions, and how it held us comfortably for reading, talking, and—yes—kissing. It was the same house we first fell in love with, but it also wasn’t, just as we both are and are not the same people we were when we first stayed there.

Right before we drove home, I walked up the hill from our place to take a few photos of the townhouse complex’s remains. Only a few buildings still stand behind a shuttered gate, their paint worn and their siding rotting. There is a large For Sale banner tacked to the side of one. On our way out of town, we stopped so I could also take some of the little cabin I stayed in with my first husband. According to a recent article in the local paper, they seem to be slated for demolition, so that a new hotel can be built in their place. I’ve always thought I’d return to stay there one day, but I suppose I might not have the chance.

I suppose, too, that at some point, the handmade wooden house Cane and I so love might no longer be available to us. In some ways, it no longer is. We love it for what it’s been, but we’re not sure if we want to return to it.

We all grow out of things that once fit. Other things wear out, or crack, or fade. Sometimes the earth opens, and things that seemed permanent fall away. Things die, or some part of them dies. Time marches on, right over our bodies and lives and all the things we wish could last forever.

It doesn’t mean they didn’t count, though. Whatever once was, it counts. Whatever remains, it counts, too.

I’m counting it all, for as long as I can.

Life has been rather lifey of late, which is why it’s been a bit since I’ve shown up here. Working off and on on this essay, as well as writing in response to

Jeannine Ouellette

’s latest Writing in the Dark intensive, has been a great balm, but it means that my creative output has been slow and underground. That’s how a small creative life goes sometimes. A lot of the time, for me. I’ve made my peace with that. I’ve got faith that a different kind of time will come along again.

I would love to know how things are going for you. It would be great to chat with you in the comments.

Counting them all

A little essay for you that's a love story, too

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