THE BOARDS END

Sunset picture taken with an iphone 4 decades ago by Christy.

There is a time of afternoon at Panama City Beach when people start drifting toward the balconies.

Nobody announces it. A few minutes earlier somebody is looking for a towel. Kids are coming up from the pool. Somebody wants pizza. Somebody else is trying to get the sand off his feet without bringing half the beach into the room.

Then the light changes.

And people start looking west.

Christy has always loved that part of the day. Especially at Edgewater. Especially from Tower II.

I knew Edgewater long before I knew her.

When I was a boy I swam in the lagoon pool not long after it was built. It seemed enormous to me. Maybe it still is. Childhood has a way of messing with the dimensions of things.

The lagoon sat in front of Tower I and beside Tower II, and Tower II had its own pool with a waterfall, which seemed like fairly advanced civilization to a kid from southwest Georgia.

Years later Edgewater became part of another ritual.

At Westwood, Junior-Senior was usually a Thursday night toward the end of April. When it was over, everybody headed south. Cars full of teenagers left Camilla for Panama City Beach and stayed through Sunday.

Mitchell-Baker had its crowd. Pelham had its crowd. The Americana had plenty of them.

We had Edgewater.

At that age nobody stands around contemplating the passage of time. We had other priorities.

But Ms. Nina Rooks and Ms. Juneille Rhodes understood something about the place that I did not.

They loved Tower II. They stayed up there while the rest of us went down to the water.

Nina had her chair turned toward the western glass. She had a book with her. Most of the afternoon the book stayed open on her knee and she did not read it. When we came up from the pool she would look over and tell us to come see the colors.

She was Basin royalty to me. Not because she had anything resembling a crown, although she could have carried one off. She was a Eubanks. She had that combination of intelligence, grace and strength that certain Southern women seem to come by without ever needing to explain it.

To Wey, Christa, and Brett she was Mother. To me she became something close to a second one. She trusted me like a son. Her home was open and her wisdom came without much ceremony.

And she loved that horizon.

Ms. Juneille did too.

I did not think much about any of it at the time. That is one of youth’s more impressive abilities. You can stand in the middle of something you will spend the rest of your life remembering and have no idea.

Then I went to Athens. I met Christy. We married. AK came along. Then Stephen.

And without ever planning it, I started taking my family back to the same place.

Edgewater.

Eventually Tower II.

The strange part is how fast my memories became theirs. The lagoon pool where I swam as a boy became the lagoon pool where AK and Stephen swam. The waterfall pool under Tower II became their pool.

Ocean’s. Pizza by the pool. Wet bathing suits hanging wherever wet bathing suits are not supposed to hang. Sand in everything. Elevator rides. The Gulf right there past the building.

And that pier.

Stephen was baptized in the Gulf outside Tower II. Then again in the lagoon pool for good measure.

Through all those years Christy kept watching the sunsets.

There was one particular view toward the pier she loved. When the afternoon started giving way, the Gulf would catch the light and the whole western horizon would begin changing colors. You could watch the sun work down until it seemed to settle into the water.

She would take the corner of the couch that faced the water. She carried a book out there with her. She rarely finished a page. She would say look at those colors, and then she would say this is my favorite place in the world, and she would say it every single year as though she had just discovered it.

People would stop. Balconies would fill. Conversations would quiet.

For a few minutes everybody faced the same direction.

Nina had watched it.

Juneille had watched it.

Christy still watches it.

Nina died in 2003. Ms Juneille passed a few years back….both in August when that sun burns into the water…..

Time kept moving. Children grew. Parents aged. Friends left us. The boy in the lagoon pool became the father watching his own children swim there, and then those children grew up too.

And our family kept moving west.

Georgia.

Florida.

Texas.

I had not noticed the direction until recently.

The sunsets changed with the landscape. In southwest Georgia the light fell through pines and live oaks. In Athens it settled beyond Sanford and the hills around town. At Panama City Beach nothing stopped it. The sky opened over the Gulf and the sun went into water.

Now in Texas we watch it fall behind the Hill Country.

Different horizon.

Same woman beside me.

She still takes the chair that faces west. She still brings a book she is not going to read.

A sunset makes you stand there and watch something beautiful leave. No photograph catches it. No amount of wanting buys another five minutes.

A pier is a curious thing. It lets you walk away from shore, out over the water, toward the horizon. For a little while it almost feels as though you could keep going.

But the boards end.

The Gulf keeps going. The horizon keeps going. The light keeps going.

We walk as far as we can with the people we love. Then we reach the end of what we can see.

And we are asked to trust the rest.

When I picture that horizon, Nina is there with a book open on her knee. Juneille is up in Tower II. AK and Stephen are running around the same pools I ran around. And Christy is in the chair that faces the water.

Maybe one day our children will remember us that way.

Not young. Not old. Not as we looked in any particular year.

Just standing somewhere we loved while the light changed around us.

And gone is not the right word.

The sun is still burning.

We simply cannot see it from where we are standing.

Boutwell Jones

redclaygospel.com

Additional pictures taken recently on an iphone in our backyard of Texas in the hill country.