There is a place that I hold dear to my heart. It’s a place that helped mold me into the person I am today. It is a place that brought my entire family together, and has kept our family together. This place is hidden on the Fort Brag Coast, and can only be found by those who have traveled there once before. It’s located amongst trees and brush and hidden deep along the cliffs overlooking the out-stretched ocean. We call this place, “Diastole.”
Imagine this: a cool breeze blowing in off the bright blue ocean, salt floating into your hair as you feel the cool wind hit your skin, the tide is coming in so white caps cover the tumbling wave breaks that cause the ice cold water to rush towards the sand castles that have no barricades to save them. You look farther out into the deep blue and spot some whales shooting water from their spouts as they rise to the surface for some air. You look straight down. The cliff from which you are standing on is covered in greenery leading all the way down to where the sanding beach lies below. Then you look back. And through the tall redwood trees you can see the wall of glass windows structuring the beach house only a hundred meters away. From this distance, you can see the various family members gathered on the porch in front of those windows, discussing the events that have taken place in their lives in the previous year, and how much they have missed each other since the last family gathering. This is what I remember from my trips to Diastole.
Being down on the ledge of the cliff was one of my favorite things to do as a child. I would sit on the thick wooden bench that was bolted into the ground, and keep my eyes wide open in case any aquatic creature would rise to the watery surface below. Every once and a while, I would get to see a few whales migrating just off the cliff or more often, see seals playfully hurling themselves up and out of the waves in the water. The cliff was also the place where you come to sit and pick out the colors in the sunset. Pinks, purples, yellows, after so many years, if you could name the color, I had seen it in at least one of the sunsets I sat to admire.
Then there was the beach house itself. When I mentioned my entire family came together at that house, I really meant my entire family. There must have been over thirty people staying on the property at one time. On the inside of the house there were only three bedrooms and then there was the loft up above. Usually the eldest of the bunch were given the bedrooms, and being one of the grandchildren, we were expected to set up camp in the loft. Which, honestly, was the coolest thing the adults could have made us do. It was practically an adventure just trying to get into the loft. In order to enter the loft, there was a one-sided wooden ladder attached to a wall in the garage, which led to a wooden platform that connected to the three-foot door into the loft area. Once inside the loft, the floor was covered in carpet, the ceiling slanted at an angle with beams hanging down, and there were three beds lined up side by side. The beds almost reminded me of the “Goldilocks and the three bears” fable because the three beds the lined up next to each other grew in size the further into the loft they were. First there was a twin bed, then a full size bed, and then a queen size bed that was on a short metal frame. At the edge of the loft, there was another three-foot door that opened into another small area that over-looked the family room. The loft was made into the grandchildren’s private space, which I might add the majority of my cousins are all girls, so you can imagine what it would be like for a bunch of young girls having their own separate space from everyone else. We had complete control over when we had to go to sleep, so we stayed up playing “truth or dare,” and as we began to mature, we would ask each other questions about our love lives, and who are latest crushes were. The loft was are safe haven from parents who were “just too old to understand us.”
Now back down into the usual living quarters, the family room was where most of the family did the bonding. All thirty of us would find some place to congregate, whether it was on the light wooden floors or the stone bench that wrapped around the fireplace. And at night, once everyone had finished eating their abalone dinners or cleaned up his or her hot chocolate, we would gather for our traditional talent show that, us, grandchildren would embarrassingly perform. There would be karaoke to a “Pink” song, or a horribly rhyming cheer followed by a five-man pyramid, or a short play performed. It really didn’t matter what performance we chose to do or how well we performed it, it only mattered that we were together and spending quality time with the entire family. We were just always content as long as we were together.
It is too bad that after a decade of spending family vacations at that beach house, we were forced to give it up. My family still tries to have family campouts once a year in replacement of the beach house, but it’s not the same. There is no more salty breezes flowing through our hair, there is no more pastel skies to lighten the mood, no more loft to giggle and reminisce, and certainly no place that holds so many dear memories. Diastole was our place of solace, it was our place to forget about the real world and only waste our energy on each other. Diastole brought my family together and it is what has made my family stay so close. I couldn’t imagine what our lives would be like if we hadn’t gathered there all those years.
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