Savannah and Celia

My first trip to Savannah was the summer when I was 18.

I was working in a restaurant with a girl named Celia who went to college with me. She had olive skin and dark hair and wore flowing dresses. She was the daughter of Delta planter and lived that summer in a rented house on Jump Off Road with a papazan chair and a huge garden that we tended in our underwear. We were working on our tans, and the house was utterly secluded. She took me to a family dinner at the house of her landlord once. We drove to the bottom of the driveway, and when the car couldn't go any farther, his son picked us up on a four wheeler and took us up to the house. There was a fire pit with a whole deer roasting over it, and the father was frying fish. Celia was the kind of person who had adventures.

One night, late, after the restaurant closed, we decided to drive to the beach. We got in her car at about 2 am and drove from Sewanee, TN to Savannah, GA through the night. We got to Tybee Island in the morning, cleaned up a little in an Arby's bathroom, and went to the beach.

We spent the day lounging on a sheet on the beach. Celia played the guitar, but I could never hear it. The wind blew the sound away from me, and the ocean roared. I can only remember what it looked like--a beautiful dark girl, mouth moving through lyrics I couldn't hear, the wind blowing her hair and the sand.

We slept that night on the beach on our sheet. I went to sleep sunburned and sweaty and woke up freezing.

A high school boyfriend wrote once that between 17 and 21 I turned  from a sword to a ploughshare, and he must have been right because tonight I felt no desire to sleep on the beach. Instead, I walked in the wind as the darkness dropped down over the water. I put my toes in the lukewarm surf and sat on a swing, watching the waves and remembering Celia for the first time in years.