GLORY BE – by Kathleen Ann Kearney

The first time I visited the Pacific Northwest was on my honeymoon in 2002. I wasn’t a young bride. After nearly fifteen years of boyfriends, one night stands and a couple of close-call broken hearts, I’d married Mark, the first genuinely nice man who wanted to marry me back.  We were married on the cliffs of Block Island, RI overlooking the Atlantic. 

Now, here we are, on the opposite coast,  on the precipice of a new life---our honeymoon at Cannon Beach. A cottage with cedar shakes and sage trim stands on stilts before me.  “Ooh I love the  “Glory Be” sign.  This place is adorable.”  I still can’t believe my luck---marrying into a family beach cabin!  Inside is a hodgepodge of furniture, hand hooked rugs, and beachy bric-a-brac.  An embroidered Tervetuloa wall hanging and a The Lord is My Shepard plaque announce that we are in the home of religious Finns.  Dark wooden walls make Glory Be feel like a treehouse. A sturdy wood stove sits in the hearth.

I walked into the tiny kitchen.  “Aww, your mother left us a note, Mark.”  There on the countertop in schoolteacher cursive is a note from my mother-in-law.  “Dear Mark and Kathleen, Welcome to Glory Be!  We have dropped off a few things to get you started. Enjoy your time in Cannon Beach.  Love, Kristina.”  In the fridge is half and half, orange juice, eggs, and Tillamook cheese. On the counter is a bag of Astoria Coffee beans, boysenberry preserves, and Haystack bread.  

Wow, I think, my mother-in-law doesn’t miss a beat.  She, a first generation American Finn and devout Lutheran who does not suffer fools easily, notices everything. On the beach she’ll warn me  to “only go in when the tide is coming in Kathleen.” She’ll treat us to dinner, sharing detailed stories about people I don’t know.  She’ll warn us to never turn left at the light by the Safeway---it’s dangerous. 

“Do you want a cup of coffee?”  asks Mark, a good Finnish son.

“Maybe later.” I run down the steps, the drive, the short block, jump over the rocks and onto the sand.  I have never seen a beach this wide, this empty!  Me, a Long Island girl, raised on crowded beaches, our blanket corners touching other families’ blanket corners. And yet, still my safe space.  A place my parents, a fireman and a nurse, could afford to take all seven kids.  I’d help my mother make the sandwiches, pack the boogie boards and beach toys and there we’d stay until the sun set and our four blanket corners were all ours. The ocean would cast a temporary spell of peaceful playfulness over us.  In the early years my father laid on the beach while my mother kept a lighthouse keeper’s vigil over us.  “Come out of the water and have a roast beef sandwich Kathy, your lips are blue” she would plead. At night, I’d lay in my bed, my pink Irish skin stinging with Noxzema. This is what a normal family feels like, I’d think, drifting asleep.

I reflect back to my wedding two days earlier—-my father’s arm linked through my mother’s.  Surprise! “Hi Daddy. You look beautiful Mom.”  I want to ask him how Ruth is doing. I want to ask her why she stayed—after all he’s done to you; after all he’s done to us.  I said nothing more; refused to let them ruin my wedding.

I shake my head.  Enough.  The vast beach beckons me.  What do I do with all of this space?

In this first year I will inhabit Cannon Beach in a body once again all my own.  There was no need to let out the wedding dress. Unexpectedly wedding day lean, no longer a mother-to-be.   I can practice yoga unencumbered. I will ask my husband to support my waist and arch into a backward bend and glint the surf from upside down-- my mouth a cave opening towards the sea.

In this honeymoon heralded year, I will walk and run to Haystack Rock to the north and Arch Cape to the south. 

“Mark?”  I’ll say, as we walk  to town, to the rock, to the starfish cave, to Hug’s Point. 

“Yes?” 

“I am holding my husband’s hand”.  

“And I’m holding my wife’s”. 

As I walk these paths, I do not yet know that I am also holding the hands of my two sons, not yet born.

Our time on this first trip flies by: Seaside, Gearhart, Astoria, Cannon Beach, honky-tonk, quaint, grungy, artsy; these places capture this east coast girl’s heart. “Mark, this place is incredible.  We should move here” I say.  Beginning a conversation we’ve now held for a quarter of a century. 

In that first year even the final morning cleanup charmed me.  “Hellooooo” says Kristina, the farmer’s daughter, bright and early, stomping her feet on the deck and knocking on the beach house door. “Hi Mom,” Mark says. She vacuums, mops, dusts, and beats rugs as if every speck of sand were the devil from our souls. 

On this first wedding laced sojourn to Oregon, Kristina’s house cleaning won’t trigger me like my mother’s Saturday morning cleaning tantrums would. “If you want something done right you’ve got to do it yourself” she would rant.  Even as a girl I knew this was the displaced frustration of a young mother whose husband made our lives hard.  Dangerous and hard.  

I’ll return to the east coast, grateful for my mother-in-law’s generosity and cautiously accepting of her high-strung ways.  I’ll marvel at how my husband is her spitting image and smile at the sound of her laughter, throaty and musical. I’ll return home hopeful, ready for new beginnings – a yoga studio I’ll open, a first home we’ll purchase hundreds of miles away from my parents.   I’ll try again to become a mother and I’ll try again to find just the right amount of space between my mother and me.