Vacation at the Mirador Motel

memories of sun, sand, and freedom

I watch, rewind, and watch again the choppy, color faded, eight-millimeter film of my mother Camille and her friend Ginger sitting on the edge of the seawall facing the black Intracoastal waterway their backs to the camera.

Ginger turns slightly to the one capturing their image, a broad smile on her lips, and my mother throws her head back and laughs. At that moment, they are showered in diamonds tossed up from the shimmer and sparkle of the dark oily water under the high Florida sun.

We are on a family vacation. This is the memory of these times; my mother, happy, in a diamond-studded carefree transient moment under the blaze of the summer sun.

beaches we roamed (author photo)

Ginger is long and lean. From years of sailing on the sea, her slightly leathered skin is browned and strewn with freckles. Her hair is a faded red, short, and a bit spiky. At around the same age as my mother, late 30s, she smokes relentlessly. She is a beachside, boat shoe-wearing, rough-hewn Katherine Hepburn.

My mother, in contrast, is voluptuous, with glossy olive skin bronzed to copper. Her black hair in tight curls is held high on her head over full lips and a straight Roman nose. Her lip color is “Cherries in the Snow.” She does not shy away from soft, bouncing cleavage and a gauzy sarong during these vacation days. She is her 12-year-old daughter’s Sophia Loren aspiration.

There is no mistaking the somber sadness in the shadows of their smiles, or in repose, for the grief in the loss of their husbands, the grief that drives their bond. My mother met Ginger in a women’s group when my mother first moved us all to Florida to live with my grandparents after my father died. She was 31 years old with four children, the baby born two weeks after my father’s death.

Devastated, she carved out a life with the help of her parents. A life to sustain us with an impression of happiness; sun, sand, fragrant gardenia, long drives for ice cream after dinner, freedom to roam sugar cane fields during the day, and vacations. Around the same time, Ginger’s husband left her for a younger woman.

This devastation and grief were their shared armor. Simply living was their revenge. They both had children around the same age, parents who could step in to help, so Ginger and Camille faced the world and our meager vacations together.

These vacations, crafted in a calculated and necessary privation, were magical to children and set the stage by which all adult vacations would be framed. At the same time, they provided a reprieve to my grandparents for our care. These adult themes keep a tenuous hold on childhood’s peace, to which children are usually oblivious. I like to think it was a conscious choice to protect us from loss, even as the vibrant lives my mother and grandparents had in New York were lost to them.

They carried on to create new lives where children might thrive, ablaze, beneath the promise of blue skies, under mango and orange trees, beside the heady scent of roses, where tomatoes are eaten warm from the sun, and basil, oregano, and parsley spice the salty sea breeze. The vacations we knew were part of that sustenance. My mother would toss us in the car with bags of food and a bag with what little clothes but many bathing suits we would need.

Off we would go, a 20-minute drive from home to the beach to The Mirador Motel. We might as well have driven across the country. We were enamored of the exotic, churning ocean and glistening sandy beach at the end of the street where the motel sat. Across the grand A1A highway at the other end, we’d find the slick Intracoastal filled with skimming sailboats at leisure and speeding motor boats pulling graceful water skiers across their wake.

The Mirador is a U-shaped set of attached shotgun-style rooms, long and narrow, windowless except at the front or rear doors. The interior facing room opens to the grass commons and pool area, while the exterior facing room opens to the gritty, sun-bleached street that runs from the beach to the A1A highway.

We think these are the exciting rooms when at night, conversations, loud and slurred, drift in urging us up to peek out the window. We are voyeurs on secret lives we do not understand, startled back under the covers when strangers bang on doors demanding entry to rooms not their own.

The rooms have a middle door that can open to connect or be locked. My mother always gets the connected rooms with a kitchenette. Every morning we bounce eagerly in the shadowy space, glancing at the TV, watching our six-year-old little sister strut and sashay in her bathing suit back and forth the length of the room, a towel draped across her shoulders, she is an entertainer. We laugh, and I wonder where she learned this.

My mother cooks breakfast in silence until finally, the meal dispensed and gobbled, she releases us to play, to roam, to leave her free to lounge with one eye on our sister at the pool. My two younger brothers bolt through the front door, the magical portal to their wild summer. I follow along, sister in tow. My mother will find us, or we’ll find her. We all roam.

The Mirador is our castle. We are the children of a queen and the guests of lords as we roam the grounds at will with the owner’s children, Ginger’s children, and any tag-a-long guests’ children. We own the pool, the open grassed area filled with lawn chairs, the chickee-covered TV and soda cooler, this magnificent bailey of our imagination surrounded by the ramshackle rooms of the motel.

We’d beg 25 cents to buy an orange soda from the cooler, settle into the hum of mosquitos, the collective lingering heat rising from our bathing-suited bodies, and watch television outdoors. Then we own the night. The sky is black above our heads, the stars drowned out by the brightly lit highway spilling yellow security across the road and patchwork of pastel-colored cinder block motels that pack this coast road.

These are our few summers in the remaining time before my mother gives up her freedom for a man she mistakenly thinks will be able to provide for her and her brood through our teen years. Before she trips into the hell that is our stepfather and we are dragged along with her. For now, we blister in the tropical sun.

Ginger and her son and daughter join us most of the days. We became friends with the owner of the motel and his children. This gives us free rein to goof around at the icy chilled front desk escaping the midday heat, eating candy from the bowl, and leaving wet patterns from our bathing suits on the fake leather chairs.

After a lunch by the pool of take-out hamburgers and sodas from the motel’s restaurant, we run across the busy highway to the Intracoastal dock and wait under the chickee roof for the owner and his boat that will take us water skiing. My oldest brother excels, advancing to a slalom ski before us.

I am ok at it but prefer to sit in the back of the boat, watching the skiers, letting the driver know when they fall. I am a sentinel, after all. I claimed full responsibility for my siblings at 7 years old after my father died. My mother was too deep in her grief to tend to us. I cannot shake the role and know this is who I will always be.

I sit on the seawall with my mother and Ginger, swinging my long, slim legs back and forth above the diamond-studded water, the sun hot on my bare shoulders, a shy, sullen imitation of a woman. I bask in the glowing company of my mother and admire her beauty.

She is kissed by summer as if she is meant to be barefoot upon a beach in Sicily, holding up her diaphanous skirt as the waves wash over her feet while her handsome suitors watch her from the shade of their umbrellas. How I wish to be her. How I wish I could hold her sadness, but she is the one for whom the sentinel cannot provide care.

My mother will drift from me, working long hours and leaving us in the care of her parents. These vacations are the last time I’ll fully know her as my mother. These vacations are the final years of our life together as a family. She cooks for us and bids me watch my brothers and sister.

My mother and Ginger sit together by the pool or on the seawall, cigarette after cigarette glamorously held to lips, tapped into an ashtray. They laugh at our antics with hands held over their eyes, shading them from the sun. I watch for the moment when a look passes between them of resignation, of sadness. As always, it is gone as another cigarette is shaken from the package, taken to lips, lit, and with a long pull, they share a glance again. My mother’s cigarette in hand punctuating the silence, a bob of her head, and then a wan smile above a deep sigh.

I long to share this moment, yet I am adrift and sadly resigned to a middle place. Not yet ready to sit with women, yet I am too tired of watching children. The shouts and sounds of boys cannonballing into the pool bring me back from my reverie. There is shoving and pushing at the ladder to get out first to keep the relentless attack going. Adults give up the roiling waves and heave onto the poolside to sit in chairs until the children lose interest in this game.

I see my sister’s round head topped with strawberry curls bobbing madly, her hands and arms swinging wildly through the water, held afloat only by little styrofoam squares on a belt at her waist. Her eyes are round in wonder, fear, and excitement for participation in this cacophony of her wild brothers and their friends, this wild water.

I step to the edge and dive in smoothly, navigating the splashing, shouting, and cannon balls. I swim sleek and quiet underwater the length of the pool and pop up beside her with a “whoosh .”Her glee is contagious, and I wrap her in my arms so we might bounce together. I push off the bottom of the pool and bring her with me into the deep end. Tossing together, we are invisible, showered by diamonds in the sunlit sparkle of the riotous blue waves.

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Thank you for reading! This piece first appeared in 2022. For more of my writing, visit my Medium and Substack