Coming Back to Uncle Tim’s Bridge

After a year of pandemic, my family reunites in a place of healing

Pulverized seashells crackle under my tires as I pull up to the cottage. I have arrived well before the 2 p.m. check-in time, having left New York at dawn to beat the swarm of summer traffic. My husband is driving up separately so he can swing by the airport in Hyannis to pick up our son and daughter, who are flying in from different cities. Our family reunion in Wellfleet marks the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic took hold that the four of us will be under the same roof. After a year of quarantine, we are returning to this cherished place, as we have every August for the past 26 years. Our kids are returning to us; and my husband and I, hopefully, to each other.

This hasn’t been the best of our 30 years together.

I blame the pandemic. Month after month of our kitchen doubling as his ersatz office, confining our adventures to food shopping and local hiking, and being each other’s only company wore thin. Silly annoyances that we’ve endured for nearly three decades of a loving marriage became increasingly intolerable: his dirty bowls and plates accumulating in the sink; my over-loading the dishwasher; his splattering over-nuked soup all over the microwave; my buying anything simply because it’s a bargain.

Yet, the pandemic stirred up weightier issues, like my strong need for conversation and his, for quiet; my need to connect in my ways and his need to connect in his own. Quarantine dragged us both down, to be sure. But we coped differently. The longer it dragged on, and the more I missed the life I’d known, the more I leaned on him for attention, and the less attention he seemed to have to give.

“I feel far away from you,” I’d say.

“But we spend time together every dinner and night,” he’d counter.

“It’s the only time we spend together.”

“We see each other in the morning and at lunch. We hike every weekend.”

“But you’re working from home now. We could be talking more.”

“I can’t talk more. I’m working. Besides, we live together. We eat together. We walk together. How much talking can we do?”

“We need to get away.”

“It would be nice, but where to?”

Nowhere felt safe.

We couldn’t even invite our kids home for a socially distanced dinner because each moved far away just as the pandemic tightened its grip: our son to SF for a job promotion; our daughter to shelter upstate with her boyfriend. My heart, aching from too much isolation and marital friction, grew hungrier and heavier with missing them. Meanwhile, my husband and I chafed.

In Wellfleet we’ll heal. This seaside town has always restored us. Splashing in the ocean and walking beneath the dunes as seals skim the waves is like coming home.

I turn off the engine, step out of the car, and find the cottage open. It is small and slightly run down, but it sits on a bluff overlooking the harbor. There is a spacious, screened-in porch out back. There is also a trail that leads to Uncle Tim’s Bridge.

I head for the wooden walkway that provides a shortcut across the creek from our bluff to the village. It’s where I go to see great blue herons step stealthily through the tall marsh grasses, fiddler crabs burrow into the mucky bottom, and the sun set on the harbor. Mostly, it’s where I go to think.

Passing slabs of driftwood and horseshoe crabs lying dead on their backs in the hot sand, I ponder the countless times I have crossed this bridge: hugely pregnant, pushing our daughter in a single stroller, both children in a double, and holding their hands while chasing the dog; in peri- and post-menopause, limping with arthritic hips and gliding with titanium ones, with a crumbling and then newly fused spine, with brown and now white hair; pausing mid-span to digest the departure of one kid, then the other, for college, and the emptying of my nest. Stepping onto the span, I notice that smooth new planks have replaced dark old, splintered ones. Yet, the bridge feels as it always has, constant and steady while so much in the world and our lives has changed.

My phone pings. My husband and the kids have arrived. I race to the cottage to find them unloading the car. Instantly we huddle, gripping each other’s shoulders and waists, weeping.

We pack every day with talking and swimming, and hiking, and eating, and more talking. I gaze at our twentysomethings and recall their earliest days in Wellfleet. This is where they took their first steps and learned to swim. It’s where they started sharing acne cream, I noticed our daughter’s slender curves tucked into a black bikini, and our son’s swim trunks hang from the upside-down triangle of his chiseled torso; where we brainstormed college essays, and all drank wine together for the first time.

Today we share tales of COVID tests and vaccinations. When both kids decided to not return to the city, my throat tightened at the thought of them no longer living close by. I breathe deeply and force myself back into the present. After all, they are here with us now. Until they aren’t.

A few days into our reunion, our son receives an invitation to fish with friends on Nantucket. It’s a ferry ride away, far enough to prevent him from coming back to say good-bye before heading to the Hyannis airport for his flight home. Meanwhile, our daughter who’s been apartment hunting, gets word of an affordable one-bedroom just outside the city, which calls her back to New York. The week that I’d counted on spending with them shrinks to a few days. I know that it is right and good that their lives no longer revolve around ours. Still, sadness swells my chest.

At least now, my husband and I can focus on reconnecting.

We resume a familiar rhythm, strolling through town in the morning, then returning to the cottage to do our respective work. After lunch we bike to the pond. I swim. He reads and naps. We end each day with a walk on the beach and a quiet dinner. It’s a simple routine, soothing in its sameness; it returns us to each other.

Time passes swiftly, and before we know it, our last night is here. He grills eggplant and swordfish for dinner. I pour a glass of the Malbec that he has thoughtfully bought for me. Suddenly, I hear a thud. I dart from the kitchen to the back porch and find him gaping over chunks of perfectly cooked fish and a platter, in pieces on the floor. “I don’t know what happened,” he says, staring at his hands as if he doesn’t recognize them. “I can’t believe I dropped it.”

“No big deal,” I offer, scrambling to salvage the plate and food. “I drop things all the time.”

“I don’t,” he snaps.

Aging had already started taking its toll but somehow the pandemic made it worse. In our mid-sixties, we are fit enough to expect our bodies to perform like they used to but old enough for them to begin letting us down. My titanium hips, and the bolts and screws anchoring my crumbling spine no longer let me run. My husband’s hands, wracked with arthritis, hurt too much for him to cook the way he enjoys, or play the beautiful acoustic guitar that the kids and I surprised him with ten years ago. On good days, we chuckle about our failing joints, our dimmed hearing, and dimmer memories, even the lovemaking that has turned delicate. On bad days, we lack any sense of humor, our attempts to engage with each other sparking brushfires.

We eat by candlelight. My husband broods over the broken meal, kneading his hands. We discuss work. An edge in his voice distracts me. Something feels off. Perhaps a comment landed the wrong way, or an errant tone tripped a wire. Conversation falters. We backtrack; struggle to clarify ourselves, anything to reclaim our fragile closeness. But every word touches a nerve. Tension thickens. Irritation grows, each of us incensing the other. Our volume rises. We were just floating. Now we’re locked in a senseless battle that has erupted like a squall that churns up with no warning, fighting over we don’t know what, angry at each other’s anger.

That night I lay awake and revisit the conversation that went awry. I envision my husband frowning at the fish and his hands. I think about his losses, and mine, and how diminished each of us feels lately. I think about our bond, how we are the only souls to whom we bare ourselves; and how, instead of holding each other close, we often exchange the fury that our diminishment fuels, simply because we can.

By morning, the storm has passed as inexplicably as it struck. We don’t discuss it. It is our final day here. Time feels precious and short. We walk. We pack. Then, he brushes past me in the kitchen, and my naked arm erupts in goose bumps. Neither age nor time has cooled the heat between us. We exchange grins and stop pulling linens off the last bed to meet under the covers. Wordlessly, we mend and doze, curled up close.

In an hour we awaken and load the cars. Before locking the cottage, I take a last walk to Uncle Tim’s Bridge. A few years ago, our daughter photographed us here, entwined like two vines, my husband’s arm encircling my shoulders, my belly resting on his hip, no daylight between us. Standing in that exact spot now, I think of us, like the surrounding marsh, teeming with richness and detritus, coming in and going out, rising and falling, and rising again.