We’ve rented this beach house for the past five years and come to this beach almost every summer of Charlie’s life. So our stays here often give us a chance to reflect on where Charlie was the last time we were here, and where he is now.

Flash back to two summers ago.

Friends were visiting us at the beach house. One friend made gumbo and we all sat at the big glass dining room table, eating rice and well-spiced seafood. Charlie had nibbled on some bread, had his rice, poked at some fish, gone upstairs. We were enjoying all the good company and, like a reflex, I went up to check on Charlie. I heard his footsteps on the stairs.

What I found on the stairs, and on the landing, and in the master bedroom, I chose not to write about in the summer of 2007. Immediate maternal acrobatics were required to get Charlie into the shower, to hand over his clothes to Jim, and to surface clean the carpet. The little white laptop I had set up to show photos to Charlie was now without a keyboard or rather, the keyboard was a heap of plastic fragments, partial and randomly cast about like the bits of shells the ocean washes up onto the sand. For the remaining week and a half of our 2007 beach house vacation, Jim searched the aisles of hardware stores for carpet cleaning products; I mixed soap and strong-smelling stuffs and scrubbed, scrubbed, scrubbed.

The spots where I cleaned with a wistful, sorrow-filled sense that this was indeed it---that this would be our last summer at the beach house, the owners had been nice about last year’s dent in the kitchen wall but they weren’t gonna be loving what happened to their carpet---those spots are still there. Those parts of the carpet are cleaner than the rest of the carpet: I noted this last year on our beach house stay, and again this year.

We love having friends visit us at the beach house: Who doesn’t want to see the ocean, sit on the beach, revel in the good air and the cool breezes? Yesterday we had six friends visiting; over the weekend, we had five. Charlie called for “friends here!”; when all six friends showed up within the space of five minutes, he kept to the couch with his iPod and YouTube playing. We went to the beach and he swam and asked to leave. We went to a take-out place and I (remembering how he had wolfed down a kid-size hot dog) ordered him a jumbo one, which he refused to touch (so I exchanged it for a costing-half-as-much kidsize hot dog---that’s what we’ll be getting from now on!). Charlie asked again for his swimsuit and it was back to the beach where it was high tide and the waves came up so far that they created a long, shallow pool on the sand.

We had dinner outside at the umbrella table in the backyard. Charlie ate his sushi in the car and poked at some rice, a tortilla, guacamole. He sat in the empty living room and listened to his iPod while we and our friends talked and I leaned back and saw all the stars and did a load of laundry.

The time passed and I went inside. Charlie was not on the footstool in the living room. I found him, his clothes piled on the floor, in the bathroom and let’s just say, everything was in the place(s) that it needed to be.

The setbacks, they are so many.

The steps forward, they are so too good.

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Another kayaking video, with paddling lesson.