On this particular trip, he had been given The Day Bed – an old, wrought-iron framed trundle bed in the west corner of the living room, nestled against a large window overlooking the bay.  It was, in the mythos of Mrs. Wilton’s House, the sleeping spot most looked forward to, and more often than not, fought over.  This was partly because, in a tiny cottage, it was one of the few private beds.  This was in larger part because, on a foggy morning, the lucky cousin could wake, long before the rest of the house had begun to hum, chirp, yell, bicker with activity, almost before the sun itself had risen, and crank open the old window, letting the moist, salty air rush over his or her face, listening to the continual clang of buouys far and near.

And on this trip, it was Brandon who had the coveted nest – awarded to him because of the recent spurt in his growth, which had caused his feet to jam up against the footboards of the beds he had slept in on previous years, which had in turn caused his vociferous (to him; “whiny,” to his mother) protest.

He was glad to be alone, specifically, for those first moments.  He could imagine that beyond the fog was anything – a boat, waiting to take him anywhere he wanted to go; a shoreline that had magically appeared during the night, beckoning him to explore; a seaplane that, of course, he was fully capable of piloting.  The fog felt familiar, as much as it was connected to what was decreasingly an annual event at best – -something he longed for the rest of the year, when the  smell of pine, and the ocean, and freshly-cooked lobster, and the sun shining down on what seemed hundreds of hours of escape, of adventures that took his and his cousin’s Star Wars figures and Matchbox cars into a hundred unlikely scenarios, was both a fond memory and the source of at times tearful longing.

He looked out into the fog.  It always amazed him, how he could come back to the same place, over and over again, finding each time that it looked slightly, almost imperceptibly, different.  How things that had engaged him happily now seemed a little less exciting; how other things he had never noticed were more vivid.  His adult mind would later see this as obvious; as the reality of a person growing and shifting perspective, as months built into years, and as experiences shaped him, some more roughly than others.  His yet-to-be-adult self simply lay in The Day Bed, looking into a gray haze that he hadn’t realized mirrored that of his own mind, his portable escape — feeling unexplained feelings and fears.

This trip had been different.  As was each trip, of course, but this particular one had been different in ways that had – as he realized only on that morning – saddened him.  And he didn’t know why.