Full of Wonder

Published: March 31, 2013 ~ 0

By Laura Edwards

We spent many of the Easters of my childhood on Oak Island, a marshy finger of land sitting in the Atlantic Ocean just off the southern tip of North Carolina. My grandparents built a cedar shake house about a mile from the beach, on a scrubby patch of land on 48th Street – a long, residential road that ends at the Intracoastal Waterway. They never poured a driveway, so when my brother and I hopped out of the car after excursions to the beach or the town park, we often found ourselves ankle-deep in thick, dark gray sand teeming with fire ants.

In those days, Oak Island wasn’t a tourist destination and had a small, mostly older year-round population; it didn’t boast many restaurants, much less churches. So to celebrate the holiday, my Presbyterian family and I donned our Sunday best and drove to the Baptist church at the corner of our street and the island’s main road. After the service, we changed clothes at the beach house and went to the park, where Mom and Dad and our grandparents hid eggs we’d helped them hard-boil and dye in every color of the pastel rainbow in the airy kitchen with the vaulted ceiling the night before.

These are the memories that define Easter for me. I realize only now, as I share them here, that my sister Taylor isn’t in any of them. The last picture of the beach house that I remember is of my mom – eight months pregnant with Taylor – in the sun room where I sat at the white desk to draw pictures and curled up on the love seat to lose myself in a story after a sun-drenched day on the beach. My grandparents had to sell the house that year. It was an “adult” thing that I didn’t notice at the time or understand after it was over, even after I’d had time to dry my tears.

It’s been nearly 15 years since the beach house changed hands, but I still miss it. Even more than the house, I miss the way of life that’s disappeared in recent years. The house itself had its imperfections; at 1,500 square feet, it didn’t have enough bedrooms to hold our extended family, and it never stayed cool during the brutal summer months. The blue vinyl couches in the living room made you sweat even if icicles hung from the porch railings outside. We didn’t have a first row or even a third row view of the ocean; 48th Street runs perpendicular to the ocean road, and our neighbors across the street had an odd affection for plastic yard ornaments. And those fire ants…

But I’ll never forget our late-night egg-dying sessions or our private Easter egg hunts in the park; Fourth of July fireworks on the Cape Fear River in Southport, just across the bridge on the mainland; picnics in the wind-beaten cabana on the Oak Island beach; family baseball games at the town’s baseball diamond and the satisfaction of knowing that I had the coolest grandmother in the world as I watched her run the bases after hitting the ball into left field; walking to the end of 48th Street in the hours before dusk to find my favorite rock perched on the shore of the Intracoastal, scribble stories in a worn spiral notebook and shape my dreams.

The meaning of Christmas, the holiday that celebrates the birth of Christ, is easy for most people to understand. But a lot of people lose perspective when it comes to Easter.

Easter, the holiday that coincides with the arrival of spring, celebrates the resurrection of Christ. But in simpler, more universal terms, it celebrates new life.

We’ve lost so much since the days of the beach house. My grandmother, the matriarch of our family, passed away on Christmas Day 2012, but we lost much of her to a monstrous brain disease called Lewy body dementia long before that. Taylor, absent from all of those happy Oak Island memories, began with a life that seemed full of promise. She has lost more than all of us.

But in the wake of heartbreak, new hope still emerges. That is the miracle of life. And I understand now that THAT is the miracle of Easter – that it’s possible to BELIEVE even after a tragedy. God’s greatest miracle was the resurrection of Christ and the gift we received – eternal life.

Batten disease is senseless. It’s terrible. It’s tragic. It’s winning the battle for my sister’s life here on Earth. It’s stolen so much – priceless pieces of Taylor that we’ll never get back; pieces of ourselves, stripped away by the pain of being faced with losing someone you love to a monster like Batten disease; and most of our energy as we battle it day in and day out to give hope to future Taylors.

But we live in a world full of wonder.

Tomorrow is a new day.

I believe.

Petals Off a Rose

Published: July 4, 2010 ~ 0

By Laura Edwards

It is July 4, a beautiful day in Charlotte. The Yankees game is on television, and the team in pinstripes is threatening to score. In a few hours, we will join friends and family for a cookout and, later, fireworks.

My mind and my heart, though, are on Oak Island off the coast of North Carolina, in the high-ceilinged kitchen of our beach house. I am 12. My mom is slicing a watermelon, and my grandmother is folding our quilt that doubles as a picnic blanket into a perfect rectangle. The men are sweating in their khaki shorts on the fake leather couches in the adjoining den. My brother, Stephen, is in the corner, playing a handheld video game. I am at the kitchen table – the same table that years later will sit in my college apartment and, after that, my post-graduation apartment back home, and finally, the bonus room in my house. I am drawing pictures in bright colors and eating a popsicle. Some of the cherry-flavored juices dribble onto my picture. I give one of my cartoon characters a red shirt to hide the spots. We are just a few hours away from piling into the car and driving seven miles down Main Street and over the bridge to the mainland and into the picturesque town of Southport on the shores of the Cape Fear River. Before reaching the waterfront park, we will stop at Hardee’s for fried chicken and biscuits and mashed potatoes and gravy and sweet tea. At the park, we will spread our blanket among the others and stretch out to eat under a hazy blue sky. After dinner, my brother and I will walk down to the pier and buy red, white and blue snow cones. Someone gives us 10 dollars to buy fluorescent light rings that we will wear around our necks after the sun goes down. Just before nine, I put my head in my grandmother’s lap and wait for the fireworks to light up the sky, an easy smile stretched across my small face.

It is just one version of a memory that was a staple of my childhood. From year to year, the minor details may have changed – for example, one year, Stephen and I didn’t make it to the trailer that sold snow cones, because we ran through the sidewalk sprinklers after dinner until the adults worried, because it was getting dark and they didn’t want to lose us in the throng of people on the lawn.

I haven’t spent July 4 on the Southport waterfront in 12 years. My grandparents sold the beach house on Oak Island when I was in high school. I have been back to the island twice since then, and only once for an overnight trip. On that particular trip, I was relieved to find that the house was still there. I was sad to see the unfamiliar sedan parked in the unpaved driveway. My mom, grandmother, Taylor, and I stayed in a friend’s condo on the Intracoastal Waterway half a mile from the old house. I had a migraine the night we drove to Southport to sit on the swings a stone’s throw from the picnic table that still had my name carved into the top in block letters and found my 6-year-old sister’s constant chattering unbearable. I yelled at her a lot. During a moment of temporary sanity, though, I took a picture of the others sitting together on the swing. It is in a frame in my guest room today. I keep the door to that room closed most of the time, but sometimes I’ll walk in there just to look at that picture. In it, T’s strawberry-blonde hair is long. As always, she is in pink. She can clearly see me standing there with the camera pointed at her, and she is looking at me. Her feet don’t touch the ground. Almost exactly one year later, she will be diagnosed with Batten disease.

A neurodegenerative disease is, in a way, like the passage of time. I have faith that there will be always something new to look forward to. After all, I met my husband around the time we sold the beach house. My mom had Taylor the last summer we spent there – a memory cemented by the picture of her very pregnant on the couch in the sun room. I met some of my closest friends on campus in Chapel Hill years later.

Time, though, while promising the creation of new happy memories, strips some of the old ones away. Since Taylor was diagnosed with Batten disease in the summer of ’06, I have lost my great-grandmother, worried constantly about my grandfather’s failing physical health and the unimaginable stress my parents have to endure, watched degenerative brain disease tighten its long-held grip on one of my grandmothers and spring a sudden, forceful, rapidly moving attack on the other. Meanwhile, Batten, in its own dreadful way, has systematically robbed my beautiful little sister completely of sight, to some degree speech and to great degree happiness. Time has a way of washing away many of the painful memories, but sometimes it also steals from us the memories that are most beautiful, like pulling petals off a rose.