I share the first paragraph of my remembrances of, and nostalgia for, Stone Harbor, below. But before I do, I'd like to share this—a photograph of my brother and sister, sand sculpture-ers supreme, taken years ago.
In the same way that I believed in black raspberry ice cream, blue-fingered crab, and the pink sheen of a flipped shell, I believed, as a kid, in the Jersey Shore, specifically Stone Harbor. It possessed me and I possessed it those two weeks of every year when our parents would pack the caroming car with suits, rafts, shovels, pails, rusty-bottomed beach chairs, crab traps, tangled reels, and (where there was still room) my brother, my sister, and me.
Oh Beth I love, love, love this piece and the remembering and the 'storing up particles of our future selves'. For me summer is the pebbled beaches of Bayville on Long Island and, also, the street I grew up on where I never stopped running, playing, swimming, exploring for even a second (unless the ice cream man came. Only then!) Here I am, ready for fall, and you brought back summer for me, thank you :)
ReplyDelete"It was sun before we suspected sun's poison, and sweets before we felt the need to punish ourselves for delicious things." I was feeling just that as you mentioned the doughnuts, and then you so precisely and beautifully articulated it.
ReplyDeleteExcellent evocation of those times, at that place, that felt so immediate and innocent.
I see your brother has always been great at sand sculptures. ( :
Love this photo. I can't wait to check out the article.
ReplyDeleteBlack-raspberry ice cream must be a strictly Northeastern thing. My sister always loved it, and mourns that she's lived in places where she can't get it for the last 25 years.
ReplyDeleteMy own Jersey summers were at Budd Lake, but my younger cousins spent theirs at the Shore. I loved this piece, Beth.