Where My Ashes Will Be Placed

Published on Friday, November 2, 2012 by Katherine

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Day Two, Nablapomada.  I mean… wait, let me copy and paste.  NaBloPoMo.  Oh what the heck… “The November 30-day Writing Challenge thing.”  Yea, that!

The suggested topic?  It’s too easy to pass up.

If you could live anywhere, where would it be?

Corolla, NC.  My mother’s beach house.  It is where my heart lives no matter where I am.  It is my escape.  My calm.  My peace.

My parents built the beach house together in 1980.  Back in the day, there was no light pollution.  There were hardly any visitors and there were plenty of wild horses roaming around the houses.  It was before the “McMansions,” the Wings and the Harris Teeter.

In the evening, the stars were so glorious and close you could reach up and capture them with your bare hands. Indeed, there was no light pollution to wipe away the magic of the night sky.

I have raised my children there.  I almost lost one to a rip current there.  I sat with my mother as we absorbed the fact she had breast cancer there.  I have cried there.  I have laughed there.  I have weathered several rounds of family-shared stomach flu’s there.  I have wondered at twin baby deer, at fox dens filled with kits and at Osprey flying overhead with fish in tow.

I have been with people I love there that are no longer with me.  I can still see my father fishing on certain days, and still talk to him often.  Outloud.

My mother and children know that when I die, I am to be cremated and sprinkled along the dunes.  Not in the water, but on the dunes.  From there I can watch over my children’s children on the beach, and then theirs, and so on.

Indeed, my heart is never completely with me.  For part of it will always be in Corolla.  The place I long to call home.