Where water meets sand, family traditions take form

"Will we see an alligator this year?" asks 10-year-old Daniel as he, his older brother Mike, and my husband and I make the annual drive from the Fort Myers airport to our rented condo on Sanibel Island, Fla. Alligators thrive on Sanibel, but in our nine years of visits, we've seen only one up close.

We swing into the parking lot of the local grocery store. Jerry, a green Amazon parrot, greets me as always with a loud "Hello" from his outdoor perch. A fixture in this shopping area, he causes shouts of glee from children – and raised eyebrows from unsuspecting women as he whistles and says, "Hi, sweetie!"

Unlike our home in New York City, where stores are known to switch ownership with the seasons and neighborhood skylines can change between visits, Sanibel Island is reassuringly the same, except for a few downed trees and rebuilt homes following recent hurricanes. This sameness makes it possible for yearly visitors such as us to shift easily into a Sanibel state of mind and resume strings of conversations from where we left them the year before.

"How big was the alligator, Daniel?" my husband, Fred, asks yearly about a sighting that occurred three visits ago. My son's arms and smile stretch as wide as they can, his gestures mimicking last year's photographs in our family album.

When I first arrived on Sanibel, and my now 13-year-old was just 4, I didn't know that we would return annually. We were a newly formed family, still unsure of our course.

But I immediately sensed the place's significance to many of its visitors, as I met people who returned year after year. They had come on their honeymoons, later brought their children, and now were supervising grandchildren from beneath their beach umbrellas.

I, who had always embraced change, found this seasonal migration from the North to the same spot in the South, quaint.

Still, I tucked this thought away, as I sorted through how to combine Fred's and my very different backgrounds.

One evening in Sanibel, I watched a father playing with his children. "Jeffrey, run to the tree," he said, and the young boy trotted to a large palm.

"Susie, go touch the big rock," he cried, and off she went. I could tell by the children's faces that this was a game they knew well. While observing, I felt that I understood something about families and rituals, and how they remind us of who we are and where we're from.

My young family had few rituals at the time, just those that Fred and I had cobbled together. These occasionally deteriorated into a tug of war as we each tried to hang on to our pasts. "My mother never cooked soup on Thanksgiving," I said as we prepared our first holiday meal together, and then I demanded, "Why do we have to eat so early?"

Page: 1 | 2