He shaped his blue lips to talk but the words were a while coming.

“C-c-can’t w-w-wait for s-s-s-summer,” he eventually spluttered, hugging his towel more tightly around him.

We sat on the sand looking back at the small dark waves of winter. Of the two foam boards at our feet, the pink one was still dry. The girl wasn’t crazy.

As she crawled around carving roads with a blue plastic rake, she set the record straight: “There’s no way I’m going in.”

Clem would later go back on her word as the lure of the frothy shoreline proved too great but for now she weaved between us on all fours, warm and dry, making various vehicle noises, she held the upper hand in the sensibility stakes.

In time his mouth thawed sufficiently for regular conversation and the eight-year-old began talking up his aspirations for the warmer months ahead.
He wanted to get a barrel and do a reo.

“Beep, beep, coming through,” his younger sister interrupted, pushing her way between us once again as her infrastructure project grew more elaborate all around. “Try not to wreck my road,” she said.

Hank studied the other surfers in the water.

“I think I did a little cuttie out there. Did you see it?” he asked.

Truth be known, it was one of those cutbacks that was all in the head. One where the head moves and not much else.

On the outside it tilted in the direction he was willing the board to go.

On the inside it probably whirled with pictures of how the turn was panning out – a swooping arc, a graceful carve. Maybe one day, who knows? I dream of those myself.

“I saw it mate, it was a beauty,” I told him.

A knee-high peeler wound down the rocky outcrop at Alex. The brisk onshore breeze clipped at its edges. Its open face tantalised more than it should have.

I could tell he was thinking about going back out, until another image popped into his head, potentially saving his stick-like frame from hypothermia.

Perhaps it was a toasted ham and cheese sandwich, or a steaming bowl of two-minute noodles with soy sauce, or the leftover meatloaf. I hoped it wasn’t the meatloaf because I fancied that idea myself.

In unison we realised how hungry we all were and it was time to go home.

Tracy had been putting the silence of the house to good use completing an assignment for her real estate course.

She already knows enough about real estate to realise that when a house is full of hungry kids, a mother doesn’t get much value out of trying to invest time in herself, so the books were traded for the breadboard as the station wagon rolled into the driveway.

After lunch and a lazy afternoon tending to household hum-drummery, a hunger for salt air grew again.

Tracy had done more studying than anybody should have to do on a Saturday, so there would be no going back to the highlighter pens and post-it notes.

Before long we were all standing at the top of Point Cartwright with our hair blowing wildly.

I told the kids that it was here, next to the lighthouse many years ago, where I had asked their mother to marry me.

Hank wanted to know if the fence which ran around the cliff top was there back then.

“I hope so,” he said before I had a chance to remember. “Or she might have run and jumped off.”

Both of them set off like gazelles down the grassy slope towards the beach, giggling as they galloped with Trace and me in mock pursuit.

We walked around the base of the headland back towards the Kawana side, searching for life in rock pools under a swirling sky of pastel grey.

The silver fish the anglers flipped from the sea seemed iridescent against the bleakness of the late winter’s afternoon.

The kids uncovered bits and pieces in the tide line – busted shells, crab claws, a piece of fishing rod – casting most them aside in the search for greater treasures.

The boy plucked a tombowler-sized lead sinker from the coarse sand.

“That’s a keeper,” he said, thrusting it into his pocket.

Clemmy held aloft a perfect cowry shell. “So’s this,” she said.

For me the whole day had been.