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Palm Nuts

We just finished a hearty lunch at The Cheesecake Factory. My husband, daughter, and aunt and I are navigating our way across the concrete jungle that is The River—a large shopping and dining center punctuated by fountains and palm trees.

We’re in Palm Springs, where my mom has a winter home, for a family vacation. My aunt flew down from Alaska to spend time with us.

It’s unseasonably cool for Palm Springs in February; it’s in the 50s, and gusty. We’re walking back to our rental car when a couple of different things happen at once: the wind picks up, and I spot something small, dark, and round cartwheeling across the pavement.

“Stop!” my husband says in a firm voice, putting his arm out in front of me in exactly the way a mom does when she slams on the brakes. Behind me, I hear Violet’s laugh and wonder what’s so funny.

“What?” I ask Scott, dumbfounded.

I don’t know if this is unique to my middle-aged, perimenopausal, ADHD brain, or if this kind of thing happens inside most peoples’ brains, but in that split second where the wind sweeps in and that dark, round object skips across the walkway and my husband tells me, urgently, to cease, my mind races to put these disparate slivers of information together. And this is what it comes up with: the fierce wind must be knocking coconuts out of the palm trees, causing hazardous walking conditions from which my husband is trying to protect us from.

“You’re going to step on my glasses!” Scott says.

I look down and sure enough, my feet are within inches of my husband’s prescription sunglasses.

Violet’s laughter continues to bubble. It turns out she witnessed the wind blow Scott’s sunglasses right off of his head, and then his stern attempt to keep me from stomping on them. Violet is a fan of slapstick humor; recently, when I was driving her to school back in Maine, we saw a kid slip on his icy driveway. While I’d put my hand to my mouth, drenched in the embarrassment I imagined the kid might be feeling, my eleven-year-old was convulsing with laughter.

Scott is less amused by the wind’s antics, which only makes Violet laugh harder. He’s clutching his sunglasses; they’re missing one of the lenses.

Which, my brain now realizes, is the thing I saw rolling across the parking lot.

Do the palm trees here actually have coconuts? I wonder. I can’t remember seeing coconuts on any of our prior visits to Palm Springs. Violet continues to giggle.

“It’s not funny—those are $500 glasses!” Scott says, cradling the frames.

The mention of the ridiculously expensive glasses snaps me out of my mental paralysis and I sprint—as fast as I can considering I am a middle-aged women who just crushed an oversized veggie burger and a small mountain of sweet potato fries at the Cheesecake Factory— toward the small pool of water where I initially saw the “palm nut” disappear.

At home, my nickname is “The Finder.” One of my superpowers is an uncanny ability (or a severe stubbornness) to locate items that my family members have misplaced. I’ll be damned if I allow the feisty desert wind to sweep away my husband’s overpriced lens.

While Scott and my aunt are looking around, trying to spot the runaway lens, my eagle eyes have already locked on a dark, round thing floating in one of the small pools surrounding a fountain. I wade into the shallow water and grab it. I hold it up in the air, triumphant.

Scott takes the lens and begins wiping it dry, while the rest of us debrief.

“That was so funny!” our daughter says.

“Not really,” says Scott.

“I thought—I couldn’t figure out why you were putting your arm out in front of me,” I admit to Scott. “I thought you were trying to keep me safe from a flying palm nut storm.”

As soon as the words exit my mouth, I realize how ridiculous it sounds. My daughter starts laughing harder, and my aunt joins in now.

“I was trying to keep you from stepping on my glasses,” Scott says. “And I don’t think palm nuts are a thing.”

This makes us laugh even harder.

A light and buoyant sensation rises in my chest, the feeling that comes with that moment of relief following a close call.

This hasn’t been the easiest of trips. My son has had a bad cold since the day after we arrived. Even the weather, which is typically warm and dreamy in the winter months, has been off.

But right now, I’m grateful to be here in the windy desert with my aunt, who, due to COVID-19, I hadn’t seen since my dad’s memorial service more than three years ago. We’ve had conversations during this trip that I’ve never had with her before. With my daughter, who is deep into her contagious dolphin laugh. With my husband, who’s trying unsuccessfully to fit the damp lens back into his frames. To be here in this body, a Finder of lost things and glittering moments.

Savor this, I say to myself, pressing the moment into my mind.

More and more, I’m realizing that these little moments—inconsequential, but also transcendent, ridiculous, and so very, very human—are the moments that help balance all the darkness out. They offer respite from dead dads and hormonal swings and the challenges of parenting.

I know that traumatic memories often get etched in our minds, snapping us out of the present and rocketing us into past pain. But maybe it can work with these moments of delight, too. Maybe we can carve these sweet scenes into our minds, storing them up for later. When we’re back in Maine and it’s 16 degrees out and I’d kill for a warm, glasses-snatching wind. When my daughter and I are locked in a tense power battle over her Starbucks habit and I forget the sweet sound of her laugh.

Marking these moments is a way of saying we were here.

“Are palm nuts actually a thing?” my daughter asks as we pile into the rental car.

“I don’t think so,” I confess.

“I think you’re a couple of palm nuts,” Scott says from the driver’s seat. Another wave of laughter rolls over us, leaving us breathless.

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