Beach Carrots
Every family has its own language.
In ours, Cheetos are called beach carrots.
My Aunt Mary Beasley, my namesake, started calling them that some what recently.
She doesn’t discriminate. Puffy, crunchy, baked...if it’s a Cheeto, it’s a beach carrot.
No adult has ever believed they were carrots.
My niece, Molly, and her brother, Benny, however ... I’m shocked they didn’t turn into Beach Carrots this weekend.
But Aunt Mary Beasley has no intention of stopping.
Some traditions don’t need to make sense.
I spent this past weekend at Country Cousins Camp in Carlinville, Illinois. It is the most treasured weekend on my calendar each year.
It looked like every other summer weekend I’ve known there: kids running from the beach to the raft and back again, too much food, too much laughing, stories that somehow get funnier every year they’re told.
On the drive home—the first time I’d been alone in more than three days—I listened to a podcasts with Olivia Wilde.
At one point she started talking about the house she grew up in.
She said there was so much curiosity. So many questions. There were always interesting people around the table challenging one another. As a kid, it wasn’t, “Be quiet.” It was, “What do you think?”
I laughed.
Not because it sounded unusual.
Because it sounded ordinary.
It sounded like the weekend I had just left.
Since driving home on Sunday, I’ve been trying to figure out why that part of the interview has stayed with me.
I don’t think it’s because my family looked anything like hers.
It’s because I recognized the feeling.
The picnic tables at CCC have always been full. Someone pulls up another chair. Someone wanders over with a drink. Someone starts a story with, “You know, that reminds me...”
Conversations meander the way summer afternoons do.
Someone brings up an article they read.
Someone else sees it differently.
A conversation about a trip to Dublin for a cousin’s wedding somehow becomes a discussion about parenting. A story about a neighbor turns into one about grandparents. Twenty minutes later, you’re wondering how you got there.
Nobody planned it.
Nobody was moderating it.
Nobody was trying to win.
Looking back, I don’t remember what we talked about nearly as much as I remember how we talked.
Questions were welcomed.
Disagreement wasn’t dangerous.
People changed their minds.
Kids lingered at the edge of the conversation until someone inevitably looked over and asked,
“So...what do you think?”
Not because they needed another opinion.
Because they actually wanted to know.
I don’t remember anyone announcing that kids belonged at the table.
We just did.
I never realized how unusual that was.
When you’re a kid, you assume every family works the way yours does. You assume every table is a place where people can disagree without getting angry. You assume curiosity is ordinary.
Maybe it isn’t.
Near the end of the interview, Olivia said something else that has been rattling around in my head all week.
She said that the older she gets, the more she realizes how little she knows. Every year, she finds herself thinking,
“Maybe I’m wrong.”
I love that.
Not because I like being wrong. (I’m a Capricorn. And the eldest daughter. Trust me—I do not enjoy being wrong.)
But because the people I admire most are the ones who can say those three words without feeling diminished by them.
“Maybe I’m wrong.”
There’s humility in that.
There’s confidence in that too.
It means you’re secure enough to keep learning.
I wonder if that’s what those picnic tables were teaching us all along.
Not how to argue.
How to wonder.
The older I get, the more convinced I am that every family has traditions that shape them.
Some are obvious.
Holiday dinners.
Annual vacations.
Family recipes.
Others are quieter.
The way people talk to each other.
The questions they ask.
Whether kids are invited into the conversation or told to wait until they’re older.
Beach carrots are new.
The table isn’t.
The table has been there for as long as I can remember.
It took a podcast somewhere between Lake Beasley and Western Springs for me to realize that not every family gives their kids that gift.
I’m awfully glad mine did.