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I can see my uncle's Miller Lite in the boat cup holder, and his tall frame steering slowly in the No Wake zone. The warm air is so salty and as we get off the boat we swim over to the shores of this "deserted island". I am 8 or 9, and I have a raw peeling sunburn only children of Boomers know. My tee shirt is wet with ocean water and I am not allowed to take it off today for fear my suburn will get worse. Wild ponies look up at us as we crack open our Cokes and set out our turkey sandwiches with chips. Has a Coke ever tasted better than on Shackleford Banks? I think possibly not. 

There will come a time this summer, when we are all there again, as we try to do every summer - together and laughing and sunburned, but Mom will not be. And I will scatter some of her ashes off the banks. Grief is the depth of your love, and it is a mourning of time going by hard and fast - you're in your world doing your things and then jolted awake by this fact of life. She is with me still every day, I know she is.  I feel an urgency to make sure she will forever be on those shores, in her chair with the water pooling around her toes, as she reads her book and her swim suit is pulled off her shoulders to get that even tan. I plan to scatter her around the different spots and just take a little bit of her with me as I take the shell-seeker strolls on Atlantic Beach too. We will ride the boat out to dinner, and I will toss her off there in the bay as well. She will swirl and spread all over the place she loved so deeply, as we all do. Freeman Lane - free woman at last. 

Shackleford Banks is a barrier island off the coast of Carteret County, North Carolina, first associated with John Shackleford, a Virginia planter who acquired land there in 1713, and it was long known as Cart Island before the Shackleford family sold it in 1805. In the late 1800s, the island supported the community of Diamond City, but a hurricane in 1899 helped drive residents away, with the last leaving by 1902. Another major storm in 1933 cut the island off from the Core Banks, and by the 1960s it had become part of Cape Lookout National Seashore under National Park Service protection.