“You know those are better frozen, right?” she asks, watching as he shakes the box of miniature Charleston Chews so it rattles loudly. He looks at her, frowning. “You can’t freeze a Charleston Chew,” he says, as if that’s obvious. “You can absolutely freeze them!” she retorts. “They get all firm and chewy and the chocolate flakes off in big frozen shards.”

She pauses to lick the basil mayonnaise off of her right thumb, then takes another lusty bite of her BLT. They picked up sandwiches that morning from Fork & Anchor: a tiny spot with worn plank floors and shelves of beach vacation essentials—dried pasta and peanut butter and fancy seltzer and Bremner wafers and kettle-cooked potato chips and those Petit Ecolier shortbread biscuits topped in milk chocolate that come in the long red and black box.

On Wednesday, I sat down to write something here. I tried six different times to write six different posts about six different substantial things—stalling each time about 3 sentences in, because I was so deeply tired that the day before I mixed up the names of my neighbor’s dogs and I could barely remember the word for spatula and yet I still woke up—without the aid of an alarm clock—at 5:41 AM the following morning. Fine, fine! I thought irritably at my body. Fine you win! I’ll just go take a 7 mile run and a swim and bake two quiche crusts and make pancakes and by 9 AM feel like a limp, cooked-five-minutes-past-al-dente piece of linguine and when I try to pick up my 14-month-old, the words “Herculean effort” will spangle and sparkle in front of my eyes like a neon ticker-tape. This is fine. Is this why people day drink? Kidding, that would be a disaster. Or would it be just the ticket…?