Ten years ago--yep, Third Eye Blind on the radio and El Nino menacing and Quebec still dangerously teetering on the edge of secession--way back then, I sat down with a pen and tried to write down all of my immediate relatives. Strictly immediate, as in aunts, uncles and cousins. I made sure to skip the obnoxious second cousins in New Jersey and the almost-relatives who I still addressed as Aunt Renee and Aunt Patty though they were only my mother's good friends. I skipped my father's family tree with some guilt, even though it's much more of a family shrub, a measly ten people. A family arbuste. I stopped, hand cramping up, at 47. I was eight and the number seemed impossible.

We've swelled since. Cousins have had cousins and have married and adopted and while there has been a funeral or two, it's safe to say that we've beat 50 by now. As my mother would say, do I have to add that we're Irish?

The summer before I left for college, a swath of us rented a big house by the beach for a week. We'd done it three years earlier, a jumbled-up attempt that left me with clumsy surfer's dreadlocks and a fourteen-year-old's directionless resentment, sandy bathing suits and a suntan. In a way I suppose this one was a retraction, a scrambling for something. All of us trying to get together and actually commune before everyone splintered off--the older cousins to school or back home or new career paths, and the aunts and uncles to arthritis, scrimping, and 50-somethinghood. The children running off into the world while the adults curled like turtles into their shells. Our last hurrah, maybe?

There were twenty of us jam-packed in the big, breezy house. Every night somebody slept on the couch. And while it's easy to lose patience with a family like this--at the nine-year-old who won't get out of the ocean, at the boy-cousins who steal all the beer or the mother who anxiously concerns herself with the amount of skin my bathing suit showed--I spent the week wading into the ocean and building sand castles and eating big meals and thinking Remember This. Hold on to this. Soak this up like the starched sun into skin that is freckled, salt-dipped, ocean-pummelled.

With a group this big, it's easy to lose track of yourself. It's easy to forget that you're even there until someone snags you with the question of What Are You Going to Do With Your Life. Between me and my newly Masters-degree'd mother and my new-career cousin Julie and my transferring-from-community-college brother, the question Ping-Ponged across the house at all hours. With a group this big, it's easy to forget that when you mention that you might like to minor in neuroscience the room will get kind of quiet and then everyone will call you Smarty-Farty for a week.

We settled into a gently awkward rhythm, waking up and gulping coffee and slinging ourselves down to the beach. Waves and people would come and go, and sometimes I'd stand up on a surfboard or an in-laws' adorable 3-year-old nephew Christian would grace us with his presence, but on the whole it was all about sleepy Irish people wading into the ocean and freckling in the sun. We told bad jokes and discussed the possibility that body-surfing is a myth. We'd finally slump back to the house when the tides got too strong for the little kids. and around five, the newly legal girl-cousins made dangerous cocktails, passing them around like letter bombs. All the while--as I chased Christian or tied up my hair or waded into the ocean--I thought to myself Remember This. Grab it and hold it and try not to let it slip, jellyfish-clumsy, though your fingers.

"These are all dead," my cousin Julie says of the jellyfish we sometimes see floating. "It's from the storms--they die and get sucked into shore." She squints into the sun and disappears into a wave. I float for a while, riding high in the water, and then wade in, my legs stinging from imaginary jellyfish.

"Hey," says my aunt Kelly. "Go get your father. He's sitting out on the other side of the beach like a grumpy Scotsman and won't come over to where we are." So I slog through the thick sand and squint a smile over at him. "They sent the mongrel," I explain. "They want you to come over." My father pretends to be stubborn. "I won't try and outdo the Irish for guilt-tripping. I guess I'll come." We pack up his umbrella and big black bag, and the two of us start back.

My father and I have the same hazel eyes and skin that tans and we flinch as if stung when it's time to spend money. With a group this big, it's always a surprise to remember that you're one of two with these traits--that everyone else around is voluble and Irish and blue-eyed, spending and drinking and laughing easily.

I'm not wholly Scots, of course. My face turns red and blisters with the sun, and I've never been tall or reserved like my elegant grandmother. I didn't inherit the Scotch underbite that my father and his father and his father wear; I got the thin-enameled catty-corner teeth that my mother's sisters have, the ones that she had before root canals, painkillers and porcelain caps. But when my father and I hike through all that sand, I can't help but feel like the quiet, judgmental sheep in this baaing Celtic mess. I put my bag down at the edge of our encampment, kick off my shoes and look around for a place to sit, and then nine-year old Grace is begging for someone to take her out to boogie board. "Hey Grace," I say, and we walk to the water together.

The week goes by quickly--some of the girl-cousins and I go parasailing and climb hundreds of feet over the water; we go see a new movie in torrential rain one night and wake up--almost early--every day to walk down to the beach. We wake up on that last Saturday and gather like lost children in the kitchen, listen to each other's complaints. But we've only been here ten minutes. My hair's still wet with salt water, my body still sloshing in rhythm with the waves. We never played Pictionary. We never made Manhattans. That epic Frisbee game. What happened?

Ten minutes later I'm lugging suitcases into my tiny dorm room. I never dyed my hair. I never spent a day surfing with Emily. I never finished that book on the civil rights movement or explored the abandoned sugar factory down by the river in my hometown. My parents suffocate me with hugs but I swear I can still feel the ocean in my blood, hear my uncle Chris mumbling about what Montreal was like in the seventies, taste homemade peach pie dissolving in my mouth with a little bittersweet sand-grit in my teeth. The door swings shut and I stare at it. What happened?