Summer's End, End of Love

The last box was almost packed when I found it. Stowed away in the far corner of my bedroom closet. It wasn’t much to look at. A pint-sized jar filled with sand and a couple small rocks. A small sand dollar. And the ring.

It was tiny, big enough to fit my seven-year-old finger. A glass stone in the center. It felt like a real diamond at the time. The band was made of some gold-colored metal. Maybe it was even gold-plated. It was cheap, but to my younger self, it felt like a fortune.

A memory from long ago: sun-filled days of childhood. Before I met the love of my life. Before I lost the love of my life. Before kids and the need to put all these memories away for a smaller place.

“Ready to go?” my daughter said, appearing in the doorway to the closet. “What’s that?”

“This?” I said, turning the jar in my hand. The sand slid inside, revealing more of the sea treasures I had collected that summer. “It’s from the summer I lost my first love.”

“Our families had been good friends,” I begin, losing myself in our story…

I don’t remember when Billy and I started to consider ourselves boyfriend and girlfriend. When we met was lost to the mists of time and memory. But by the time we had finished first grade, we were an item. I thought we’d be together forever, in the way that children do when they’re too young to realize what that meant.

That summer, our family went camping at the ocean together, in Olympic National Park, at the Kalaloch campground. We had gone there every year, for as long as I could remember. It was different than it is now. The primitive campground, where my family always stayed, was one big open field overlooking the ocean. Footpaths brought us down to the beach. The bathroom was an outhouse in a big cement building, but as a kid, I didn’t care that much about cleanliness. The only thing that I hated about it was that it stank.

We could show up Friday night and there was space for us to spread out. A few other people were there, but it wasn’t crowded. Not like it is now.

When we arrived at the campground, our families parked next to each other. My brother and I piled out of the back seat of our car, and Billy and his siblings slid out of theirs.

I immediately slid out of my shorts and took my shirt off, revealing the hot pink one-piece swimsuit underneath. “Last one to the beach is a booger muncher!” I shouted, already running. My long blonde hair flew behind me, and my flip-flops clopped as I ran.

The others didn’t need any prompting. They had also started running as soon as they escaped from the car. We left our parents to set up the tents and build a fire, but we didn’t care about things like that.

I reached the path to the ocean first. Small branches from bushes brushed at my legs as I scrambled down the hill, everyone following behind me. At the bottom of the hill, we slid over rocks flattened by the waves, almost like small pancakes, and climbed over driftwood logs bigger than me—remains of old trees that had washed up from storms the winter before.

After the driftwood was the sand. That was where my brother, George, passed me.

“Ha!” he cried out, reaching the icy water. “First!”

I was second, which was okay with me. Billy was third, followed by his brother, John. Their sister, Suzy, trailed behind.

“You’re the booger muncher!” Billy said to his sister, laughing.

“No fair! You’re older than me.” She reached down to the water and splashed her brother.

Suzy did have a point. She was only three.

“Wanna build a sand castle?” Billy asked, turning to me.

I nodded, and we went away from the water a ways, to that sweet spot where the sand was still damp, but it was far enough away from the ocean that the waves wouldn’t crash into it. At least not until the tide came in.

“I got something for you,” he said, as I plopped down into the sand. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a ring.

“Wow,” I said, gasping. “Is that a real diamond?”

“Nah, I got it at the grocery store. Out of one of those machines in the front. But you can’t tell, right?”

I nodded. It was really pretty. It fit my finger perfectly. The glass sparkled in the sun.

“We should get married someday.”

“Absolutely!” I said, giving him a hug.

He grinned, then kissed me on the cheek. We set out to building the most spectacular sand castle ever.

“Look, a sand dollar!” I exclaimed. I picked it up to admire it.

“Put it down if it’s alive,” he says. “You wouldn’t want to kill it.”

“No, it’s dead.” It was dried out. Its underside had a crack in it. “I’m going to keep it.” When we went back to camp, my mom suggested we put it in a jar with some sand and turn it into a keepsake.

The rest of the week went by in a blur. It was one of the few weeks of summer that was actually warm.

On the last day, Billy wasn’t his usual happy self. He put his arm around me. “I have to talk to you.”

“Okay.”

“Let’s go to the beach.”

I nodded, and we walked down the path, over the rocks, over the driftwood trees, and onto the sand. He stopped before we got to the water.

“What’s up?”

Billy looked at his feet. Sand caked his toes and his flip-flops, as did mine. “I got bad news.”

My heart felt heavy in my chest. “What?”

“Dad told me this morning. We’re moving.”

“Where? Across town?”

“No. I wish. He got a new job. We’re going to South Carolina.”

“Oh.” I looked down at my hand. The ring sparkled back at me, even though it was slightly covered with sand. “We can write each other, right?” I looked back up at him with hope.

“Of course!”

I pushed him playfully on the shoulder. “You’re going to get a funny accent, you know that? People will make fun of you when you come back.”

“Probably.”

I grabbed his hand. “It’ll be okay.”

I never saw him again after that trip.

We wrote each other a couple of times that fall, and a few times after that throughout the rest of the year, but less frequently.

I wore that ring all through the second grade. When the rest of my friends were holding mock weddings for “Wednesday wedding day” or “Monday marriage day,” I would tell them I was already engaged and would show off my ring. They would laugh, and we’d forget about it while we played games of jump rope or tag.

Around the end of the school year, I took off the ring. I put it in the jar with the sand and sand dollar from the year before. Over the next few summers, I added to the jar with some other things I found at the beach.

“I found him on Facebook a couple years ago,” I said, turning the jar over in my hand. “He turned out okay. Has a couple kids.”

“Did Dad know what this jar meant?” my daughter asked.

“No. It never came up. Not that it would have mattered. It had been—twenty years before we met?”

A tear sprang to my eye. My husband and I had had a lifetime of memories in this house, before his heart attack the previous winter. More memories than this little jar, and the jar of sand my childhood sweetheart and I had accumulated.

I added the jar to the box.