Every fall the Muumuu Mamas, nine middle-aged women, go to the beach for a weekend. The others have demanding jobs, with too many needy people, students, committees, travel.  I am the only one who has retired, but I have Amanda.  The beach weekend is our escape, and we look forward to it all year.

Planning begins in the spring, when someone sends an email: is it time to begin looking for a house?  At least six weeks before the trip someone sends out a sign-up sheet for meals, and food porn fills our in-boxes..

Over the years we have gone from house to house, seeking perfection.    Michelle, the most fastidious of us, sets the standard. The consensus: we want a house that is nicer than our own. (For some of us that would not be hard to find.)  I am happy in shabby, and have a fondness for shacks, but I can wallow in luxury with the best of them.      
 

For two years we rented a house that belonged to friends of Michelle, but she was active in gay rights in Florida, the friends grew more conservative, and that became uncomfortable.  Then I found a beautiful house at the part of St Augustine Beach where driving is forbidden.  When we arrived it had just been sprayed for bugs.  Ceal couldn’t stand the smell, and earthworms were committing suicide in the swimming pool.  The next year we rented the house next door,  but the balcony had no shade.        

This year we think we have finally found a permanent home. It’s on the ocean, two stories, with five bedrooms and five baths, two living rooms, a deck upstairs and patio downstairs, a swimming pool, and a long boardwalk over the dunes to the water. Its name: Peace of Paradise.  

 

EARLY MORNING AT PEACE OF PARADISE

 Peggy, who arranged the rental, goes over early Friday to open the house; the rest of us drive to the beach in twos and threes.  When Iris and I arrive, we find Marcie, Michelle and Peggy already there.

Peggy challenges us to find the ugliest thing in the house.  She gives us hints: it is downstairs, and has been put away.  After a brief search, Iris comes back upstairs, waving her trophy.  A flamingo tchotchke, neck curving down, its rump a burst of pink feathers, standing in front of lurid green leaves.  It is one of a pair of bookends, and I long to steal them for the shelf in my office.       
 

Apart from the bird, the decor is inoffensive, standard beach themes with not too many shell-encrusted items. The swinging gate from the beach to the boardwalk has a mosaic peace sign.  Iris decides that the ceiling fan in the living room, huge blades shaped like palm fronds, is the only feature that is unacceptable.  If she weren’t so short, it might cut off her head, and anyway, it is clunky-looking. 
               
The Mamas give me a downstairs bedroom all to myself with a huge jacuzzi tub in my private bathroom and the pool right outside my door. They say  it’s because I go to bed and get up so early, and they want me away from the main part of the house. But they spoil me, I think,     because they are through with child-rearing and I have Amanda.   

Many of us are cooks, all of us are gluttons, and the food is endless and varied.  Among other treats this year we have the best cioppino I have ever eaten, black rice salad, warm red cabbage slaw, pasta with walnut pesto, a pear and apple cake, jelly tots. Plates of cheese, vegetables and hummus, and bowls of nuts are laid out on the counter, and there is always an open bottle of wine. I make black beans and rice for Friday dinner, Julie makes Caesar salad.  I was planning cornbread, but all of us thought somebody else was bringing eggs and milk.

Saturday morning I finish writing about 7:30, and decide to jump in the freezing pool.  A physical therapist once told me that ice is my friend, but I admit I was also showing off.  I strip and step outside.  Think a minute.  Go back inside and fill the hot tub, sink until my breasts are bobbing, and turn on the jets.  When I am hot to the core I pad out to the pool, walk to the edge and jump.  If I hesitated I wouldn’t do it, and in mid-air I have a moment of exhilaration, thinking, “Can’t turn back now!”  I tread water for about fifteen minutes, every aching joint and bone crying hallelujah. When I’m cold to the core I return to the tub.                
      

I smell bacon upstairs, and I’m tempted.  But once I go up and connect, it will be hard to tear myself away, and I am so happy to be alone, pampered, free.  I contemplate a nap. I write a little more, and then a smoke alarm goes off, piercing even way down here.  I’m ready.

Iris always brings her griddle and makes pancakes, but with no eggs or milk we graze – coffee, yoghurt, cheese, fruit, bread, sweet potatoes, bacon – there are plenty of choices.

After breakfast Marcie, Iris and I go to the store.  While they are at Publix, I go to the Dollar Tree for a coming-home gift for Amanda, and find bags of rubber snakes, perfect for her Halloween Medusa costume.  We head up A1A to the fish store, and while Marcie buys the fish for dinner, Iris and I go to the fancy thrift store down the street.  I find a nice purse for Amanda’s birthday for $9.50.  I plan to fill it with little gifts, individually wrapped.  I am a little concerned about heavy metal rings on either side, which could make it a handy weapon, but I decide we have outgrown that concern.

If our weekend has a theme it is, “No one does anything she doesn’t want to do.” People walk on the beach, read, write, swim in the ocean or the pool. A 1500-piece jigsaw puzzle attracts several of us, but by Saturday night it's abandoned as too hard. Iris and Michelle have brought their extensive beading supplies, and they and Julie spend some time making necklaces.

 

 

There is always someone cooking, someone eating, someone tidying the kitchen. We turn on the music and dance.  We talk and talk, and sit in comfortable silence. We take naps whenever we want. 

At dinner and afterwards we are all together, talking about our lives, telling stories. This year Julie has a variation on Dictionary.  One person reads the description on the back of a romance novel, and then all the others write first paragraphs for the book.  The leader reads all the paragraphs, and we guess the real one.

Marcie’s daughter Naorah named us the Muumuu Mamas when she visited at 10am on our first beach weekend and found us all lounging in our muumuus drinking wine.  We get together as often as we can, for dinner, canoeing, or celebrations.  We’ve made Christmas cookies, and Christmas stockings for the HOME Van. When I had knee surgery, Joe spent the night with me at the hospital and the Muumuus took daytime shifts, so I was never alone.  The nurses thought we were a church group.

One husband thinks we go to the beach to get away from our husbands.  Marcie says, “No, it’s because we want to be together.” (One of us who shall be nameless says, “The other is just a fringe benefit.”)

The beach weekend is our gift to ourselves and to each other.  It is a celebration of our friendship.  I don't know how I would manage without the Muumuu Mamas.

 

DAWN

 

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NEXT WEEK: The Church Search: An Infidel in Church, Part I