The good, the bad and the ugly…
Hey ya’ll! Dree here with another trip down memory lane. I was struggling last week with sharing this next memory because it was so traumatic to me at the time but it’s part of my story and who I am. So this week I have decided to go there. I’m not really sure who’s reading this anyway but it doesn’t really matter because this journey…at least this go around is for me and being true to myself. That means sharing the good, the bad and the ugly of my story. Besides let’s face it who’s got a perfect, rosy story? No one that I know of. So here we go down the rabbit trail to my worst beach memory ever…
When I was 16 years old I went to go live with my father. I could no longer stand living with my mother and her strict rules. I couldn’t go out with friends and it seemed like I was always being grounded at the drop of a hat for the smallest thing. I blame this mostly on my sister getting pregnant at 18 because after that it’s like the reins got tighter around my neck and my mother would be damned if she would have another daughter popping up pregnant. So I guess her answer to that was to keep me locked up in the house as much as possible.
My father moved around alot with different jobs but when he finally settled in Arlington, VA I jumped at the chance to go live with him. I moved in the summer after 10th grade and when I walked in the house my dad sat me down and said, “I have only 1 rule…there are no rules”. Try telling that to 16 year old and see what happens. Yep you guess it, I went nuts. I went out all the time and mostly stayed at my friend’s houses every chance I got and ran around with them.
During that summer that I had moved in with my dad, my grandmother had decided to invite me to the beach. Of course I went because it was….well…the beach! If I had only known what lay in store for me I would have ran the other direction. This was no new thing to go to the beach with her, heck I had been doing it for the past 16 years everything was gonna be fine…..right?
The trip started out like any other beach trip, get up early in the morning, stop at McDonald’s before the Bay bridge, then stop at Olga and Robert’s farm and finish our trip to the beach. Olga and Robert would come down and have dinner with us which was nice and some other friends of my grandmother’s were supposed to come at another point on the trip. So in between these visits with guests my grandmother and I went out to eat at a restaurant in Lewes. We were seated on the dock by the water and had our menus ready to order when my grandmother decided to bring up me moving out of my mother’s house and how much I had hurt my mother. I sat there stunned not knowing what to say and usually in my family you don’t defend yourself because you’re wrong anyway so you just sit there and take it. She then began berating me and in huff stood up and walked out. She was walking so fast back to the car I had to practically run to keep with her apologizing to the staff on my way out.
She continued to berate me all the way back to the beach house and once inside started to go on a rampage and throwing things and yelling at me and telling me to pack because we were leaving the next morning. I was horrified and called my dad to come and get me that night because I didn’t want to stay there with her. My grandmother grabbed the phone and said, “you don’t have to get her, we’re leaving tomorrow!” He told me to try and hang in there through the night and he would see me in the morning. I tried to reason with my grandmother that we shouldn’t leave because these other guests were coming and she said she didn’t care and was stripping the beds and the linens and packing the house back up. I ran up to my room and locked the door and began to write in my diary what was happening just in case something happened to me. She was banging on the door like a raving lunatic demanding that I open the door which I did and she continue to say horrible things about me and my father. Walking away she said, “and write that in your damn diary too”.
I sat there with my packed bag debating if I should jump out the window and go to the police. What if she killed me before morning, would anyone find me I thought? Yes, I seriously had these thoughts about my grandmother. There’s more history here that I won’t go into but I had reason to fear for my life. It was the longest night of my life and I couldn’t wait to jump in that car and get home to Virginia. Little did I know this was the last time I would ever see the Lewes house again.
We rode in silence the first half of the trip when she decided to stop at McDonald’s for breakfast. I didn’t want to stop, I just wanted to get home. Reluctantly I went in the McDonald’s with her and yep you guessed it after getting our food and sitting down she began to berate me again and got up and left again. I remember thinking she was certifiably insane.
We finally made it to my dad’s house and I leaped out of the car into my dad’s arms crying and clinging to him. He told me grandmother to never come near me again. I swore I would never speak to her again in my life. Two weeks later I received a call from her like nothing happened asking me if I wanted to go shopping (bribing and manipulating with money is the way my family works) I told her no thanks and hung up the phone. I wasn’t around my family too much during those years that I lived with my dad and when I did come around, I was leery of my grandmother and stayed as far away from her as I could.
Some time after that she sold that house. She claimed that no one ever went down there which wasn’t true. My mother and stepfather had full time jobs and when they did go down my grandmother would put them to work, taking care of the yard and house which wasn’t much of a vacation for them. I guess she regretted that decision because not long after she ended up buying another house in Lewes but this time to live in year round. She rented out her house in Arlington and moved to the beach. This house was 2 rows back from the beach and on the main drag. It was a tiny rambler that didn’t even look like a beach house.
Time I guess healed the wound because I did end up going to that house, only two times that I can recall. I think once when I was 18 and again when I was 20. I think it was 1995 because I was out of high school and working full time and I was going to drive myself down. Now this was before internet and smartphones and I remember my mom saying, “you can’t drive there yourself you don’t know how to get there.” I said, “of course I do, I’ve been going my whole life”, and sure enough I did. I remembered exactly how just by the landmarks alone but that was the least of my worries. I was worried about another repeat incident like that one that happened 4 years before. The good thing was I was driving by then and could leave if I needed to.
I spent my days on the beach trying to recapture the days gone by but it wasn’t the same. The trip was bearable with no drama like before. That would end up being my last trip to Lewes. Not long after that she decided to sell that house too and she moved back to her house in Arlington. I think she was there only a year or so and again she said that no one visited.
To this day my grandmother beats herself up for selling the house on Bay Avenue. It really was a mistake. She had bought that house for like $150,000 and at one time someone else had bought it, remodeled it and was listed for like $1.5 million. Have you ever seen the show Big Beach Builds with Marnie Oursler? That’s what could’ve been done to that house if my grandmother had held on to it. I was mad for a long time that she had sold it to because even though there was 1 bad memory there, the good ones overshadowed it and I would have love to have kept that house.
So now it was all gone, all over. No more beach, beach houses, no more vacations. I wouldn’t go on another beach vacation until the year 2000 and that would begin a whole never adventure….
