Home Sweet Home Away From Home

I have prepared for every contingency. We have water and snacks, two volumes of Harry Potter, a van-load of groceries, bathing suits and beach gear, and, most importantly, a print-out of the email detailing instructions for the condo we have rented at the beach.  We have everything, except--

“Unit number?” asks the woman who is working the gatehouse at the condo complex.

“Um, just a sec.”  I scan the printout in my hand again and again. Where is the unit number? There is no unit number! My stomach plummets. I grab my phone and punch in the condo owner’s number.

“I’m just gonna call Nick,” I say, trying to hide my rising panic.

“Oh, Nick Ferez?” says the woman.

“Yes!” Oh, thank God, she knows Nick!

“Yeah, I know Nick.”
I smile in relief.
“But I don’t know which unit is his.”

The complex has more than a hundred units. But Don, as always, is nonplussed.

“We can just drive around,” he suggests. “There’s probably not many units with a lock box.”

It is like solving a puzzle. We are looking for a condo that faces the ocean, on the ground floor, with a lock box on the door that opens with the numbers in the email.

“That way!” I say, pointing. I think I recognize the building, at least, from the picture on VRBO.

There are not many condos that are ocean-front, but every one of them has a lock box on the door! Don and I scuttle around, spinning the numbers on the lock boxes on each door.  None of them open.

Let me just pause here to say that if Don and I were at all with the times, we would not be in such a ridiculous predicament. I would simply have opened my email on my smartphone and found the original contract for the condo, and voila! Unit number.

But, alas, neither of us has a smartphone, which has, in only a matter of years, left us both feeling like unintentional Luddites.

I do, however, have my Chromebook, and we are close to our condo-- I can feel it. Maybe we are close enough that I can get on the WiFi. I scroll through dozens of locked networks, all with maddeningly long-winded names. Just as I am beginning to despair of ever finding WiFi network 239G23A283kiasdKFNNdqwagrlf9993fSIsf23r (to which I have an equally lengthy and senseless password) I am-- without explanation--connected. I open my email, find the contract, and there, sweet Jesus, is the unit number!

Ah ha! We were so close. Only moments before I had been furtively spinning the combination of exactly that condo, expecting someone to open the door at any second and demand to know just what, exactly, I thought I was doing.

“816!” I yell triumphantly to Don, realizing at precisely that moment that my son is in tears.

Now that I am no longer trying to find our condo ala James Bond, I feel better positioned to reassure him.

“It’s okay,” I tell him. “We know which one it is now. We’ll get in.”

But Clayton isn’t crying about that. He’s crying because this is not what he has imagined! Not the part in which his parents scurry about like thieves-- none of us have imagined that. What Clayton is upset about is that the whole picture--dozens of buildings, each with unit upon unit-- does not fit the image he has had in his head: a secluded cottage, alone on an empty expanse of beach, deserted but for a few cute babies and a kindly, bearded old man with a dog.

I try to reassure him that he’s going to love it as soon as he gets inside. Which, at that point, I assume will be imminent.

But try as we might to open the lock box, it will not open. For the next twenty minutes, we position and reposition the numbers again and again. We coax. We yank with brute force. We call and text and leave message after desperate message with the owner. Just get us in!

Nothing works. The kids are all crying now, sure we have abandoned them in the parking lot. Meanwhile, the ice-cream is slowly melting to a syrupy soup in the back of the van. Also, a terrible suspicion has taken hold of me, so terrible it takes all my courage to even say the words.
“What if it’s a scam?”

Despite the profusion of texts and calls and emails I have exchanged with the owner, it now seems too terrifyingly possible. Someone has cashed our check and sent us all the way across the state to a condo that exactly matches the pictures on the website-- but it is a scam. The numbers won’t ever open the lock box; we will never get inside.

We do get inside, of course. Ten minutes later, after the kids have changed into their bathing suits and Don has taken them to the beach to cheer them out of their tears, the owner calls back and walks me through the opening of the lock box. (I am so relieved I refrain from telling him that those precise instructions could have been included in his email, saving us all from unnecessary panic.)

Once we are inside, even Clayton has to admit that the condo is perfect. That evening, and every evening after, we have dinner around the small table on the balcony, mere feet from the beach.  And each night, after we put all three kids to bed, in various combinations, on the two bunk beds set into the small corridor, Don and I sit outside on the balcony, reading and talking as we watch the full moon rise over the ocean.

I know my friends have been skeptical: the five of us in a one-bedroom condo? What kind of ten-year anniversary celebration is that? But it is just right. The small condo is like a little nest, cuddling us together. With our lives pared down to such simplicity, we fit perfectly. Each day follows the same unhurried rhythms: meals together on the balcony, endless games of Calico Critters, swimming, sand castles, Harry Potter....

There is nothing unique to it at all; everywhere we look, we see families having essentially the same vacation. And yet, like every parent, I can’t help but be struck by how special my children are. Clayton, with his gentle spirit and boundless creativity, choreographing their elaborate play. Dee Dee, always so eager to learn and to love, reading anything she can get her hands on. Sylvia, sensitive and silly and always ready to make everyone happy.

The kids take their Calico Critters on adventures around the condo, or set them up in their ‘vacation home’ under a kitchen chair, and even when I stumble over them, I can’t help smiling. The little critters look so peaceful and happy in their home-away-from-home. In fact, they look a lot like us. And, lucky for them, they didn’t even need a key.