This past Thanksgiving, my daughter Molly and I drove down to Sunbury, on the Georgia coast, where my parents had a home when my children were young. For Molly, who was only six when my folks sold their house to move into a retirement community, Sunbury seems a bit like a dream. For my two older children, though, it was a magical place very different from our home town, a place on the river where they could run and play with their cousins, watch and laugh with their grandfather at the antics of the neighboring peacocks, and go fishing and shrimping with their grandmother. There was even an electric car they could drive up and down the sandy roads to and from the dock. Sunbury helped to define their childhoods, embellishing their remembrances with the smell of river mud, the feel of the coastal sun on bare backs, and the taste of a low country boil. For me, it was a place to be a daughter again, turning over the reins of daily life to my mama and daddy for a few short days.
Sunbury is, to my children, what my friend Mary Summerlin calls a sacred place, a place that anchors them, a place replete with the gentle ghosts of fond memories.
What are your sacred places and what memories do you have of them?
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