The lover in the sky

     It was supposed to have been a work-around-the-house-day, tackling little projects on our endless “honey do” list, but sometime just after lunch Rick got this restless look in his eyes and said, “Let’s play hookie.”
     So we went to the beach.
     Yesterday was dream-like in its beauty, sunny and nearly cloudless, with a freeze-frame clarity to every scene – “a darlin’ of a day,” my grandmother would have called it – and we went to a beach neither of us had ever visited before, Wallis Sands, near Rye, N.H.
     It is long and sandy and it was very crowded with young families building sand castles and old people nodding in lawn chairs and laughing children running around with plastic buckets in their hands. We spread out our blanket and I opened up a book about kayaking in New England and about two minutes later I did something I have also never done before – I fell dead asleep on the sand.
     What is it about the feel of the sun that is so soporific and so sensual – so personal in its touch – that you forget all around you and surrender only to it, as though it were a lover?
     I don’t have an answer, but I do know that I slept soundly and sweetly for about an hour before a little girl bumped my foot as she ran by and roused me from my reveries. And thank heavens she did, or I might be there still.
     Later, we drove to Portsmouth and sat on the deck of a restaurant and had drinks and fried zucchini and laughed about our many home projects that would still be there another day.