Personal Essays

In my mind, summer is synonymous with beach. Growing up in Maine, the beach meant bringing sweatshirts for after you'd been swimming so long teeth chattered and lips turned blue.

It also meant the beach combing treasure hunt, sandwiches from a hard plastic cooler, songs playing on a transistor radio, and quite possibly a bit of a sunburn. People were not obsessed with sunblock in the seventies or eighties; folks wanted a tan.

I go to the beach when I can now. I take the commuter rail to a place called Singing Beach (where I met sandcastlematt), and it takes about as long as the car ride did when I was a kid.