Every year, we hit a lake in upstate New York. We stay at a huge log cabin with all my husband’s friends. One of his friends has a kid our daughter’s age, and the lake is beautiful and cool in the heat of summer. We go for the Fourth of July, and there are fireworks.

My mom preferred Ocean City, New Jersey.

By a lot. She actually only ever took us to a lake once, if I’m remembering correctly. It was with a family friend, and the kid there was angry that I wanted a turn to paddle the canoe so she took the paddle and shoved me out into the middle of it.

That kid’s another story, though. Another blog post. Oddly enough, it’s a story about my husband.

Either way, Mom preferred the ocean, and that beach specifically. We went at least once every year. We went to an amusement park people died at, we bought fudge from Fudge Kitchen and stood and watched as they pulled great opaque globs of taffy apart in the front. We stayed up late on the boardwalk until the night had started to cool the sun from our limbs. We slept in a small motel run by an angry old Irish woman that made her feel at home.

Every trip, we stood at the end of a dock with the bathrooms on it and looked out at the sea. Held hands, and she made us say it in unison: “We’ll always be back.”

The first time I brought my kids to that beach was a couple weeks ago, over half a decade since the first one was born. We scattered Mom’s ashes, and I said it quietly, under my breath: “Yeah, Mom, we’ll always be back,” as I let them slip into the sea.

Mom made a cloud in that water, grey and growing. Rain was coming in from the horizon in bigger, faster growing clouds. It was a little past time to leave, but I waited.

The quiet made me cold.

Then, baby girl interrupted with a whoop, leaping directly into the Gramma cloud, shouting, “Look, look! I’m swimming in Gramma Susan’s body!”

I don’t think I’d laughed so hard in months.

“She would’ve loved that,” my grandmother professed. My aunt said something similar.

She probably would’ve.