Here is a picture of  the Outer Banks. I have vacationed with my family at the Outer Banks every July since 1977.

Now I have children. One of them is starting kindergarten in 2 weeks. The same week my family will be in the Outer Banks, the place I've vacationed every year since 1977. Every year except THIS one.

Visiting this beach is more than a vacation for me. In fact, every year, as we cross the long bridge over the Oregon Inlet to head back to the mainland, I tear up a little. It's not because I'm sorry to be returning to normal life (though that's never easy); it's because I am leaving a place where I feel like myself completely, where all the little holes life drills in my heart and soul and psyche over the course of the year are healed.

When I'm on that beach, especially early in the morning or in the evening after dinner, I have this sense of all the me's that ever walked there: 2 year old me, 9 year old me, 15 year old me, the me who got married there, the me who dipped Owen's toes in the ocean for the first time. It is a place that always feels the same to me. It has changed a good bit since my childhood, but regardless of these intrusions--the mini-mansions, Food Lions, and tacky oyster bars--it feels the same. When I wake up in the morning and go out on the porch, the smell, the sounds, the dampness, the breeze all feel the way they felt 20 years ago. It really is like encountering some essential version of myself, a spirit that waits for me there. 

I realize this is pretty melodramatic, but I sincerely feel this way about the Outer Banks, and I am sincerely mourning the interruption of my tradition this year. Yes, I am thrilled for Owen, excited about his first day, giddy about going to Target next week and buying tidy new packs of crayons and unrumpled notebooks. But as I celebrate this step with him, I have to push a strong surge of disappointment away.

Next summer, my parents generously plan to shift the weeks we will go to the Outer Banks to accommodate Owen's (and his cousins') new year-round school schedule, so I will return next year. But for 365 more days, I'll have to live without the renewal that my beach vacation gives me. Even if we take a different vacation later this summer, even if it's at another beach, even if feel somewhat recharged, reinvigorated, I know I won't be filled in the same way.

There will not be 29 me's waiting for me where we go. No 29 me's reminding me who I am.