As we've been cleaning up the new game room (which was formerly the "storage room"), I ran across some pictures that I've had stashed away for a long time. One of them was this one, which is pretty much my favorite picture of me ever. This photo means a lot to me--I always had it on my bulletin board growing up, as you can see by the holes in the paper--but more than that, it represents some really great times in my childhood. We had a summer beach house in Old Saybrook, CT (famous for Kathrine Hepburn living there, and being only a stone's throw from Old Lyme, which is I guess where Lyme disease first became a big deal), and we got to spend all summer there (back when summers were three months long). My grandparents had a beach house in Madison, which was only about 20 or 30 minutes from our house, so we visited a lot. I loved their house. I loved it so much that you are going to hear all about it right now, because that's where this picture was taken.
The house itself was great to me. It was small, but there was only the two of them, so that didn't matter. It was on a neighborly street that was lined with big trees, maybe oaks, I don't really know, but it was always shady and cool outside. My grandfather had a big inboard motorboat in the side yard that he let us play in when we weren't at the beach. There was a huge screened-in front porch, with those chaise louges and chairs with really comfy squishy all-weather plastic cushions on them--that's where we'd hang out if it was raining. Their living room was decorated with lots of driftwood and those colored glass balls that hung in nets. I don't really know what those were, but you'd see them at the beach a lot in those days. They had a huge kitchen with vinyl-covered barstools that would spin around really fast. The kids room had wallpaper covered in toy soldiers and my grandparent's room had a giant white and pink conch shell on the dresser. My grandmother told me that one day at the beach, someone discovered a huge bed of conchs way out in the deep and she made my grandfather swim out there and dive for one. Out back was a really small porch where my grandfather would do his grilling, and we used to toast marshmallows out there after dinner. My grandmother would always pinch my side to see if I'd saved room for marsmallows.Their beach was great, too--only because it was so unusual. I think it was meant to be a private beach, so there was never any appropriate public access. You had to walk down a staircase that was built into the side of a wall and then scoot across a ledge to get to the sand. It was easy at low tide, but at high tide the waves would be crashing on you as you walked along. I'm sure it was completely safe or my parents wouldn't have let me do it, but it always felt scary. Once you got down to the beach, there was so much to do. Being a northern beach, it was rocky. The rock in the picture was covered in mussels, which were great for catching crabs if you could pry them off the rock and smash them open. Out in the water was a HUGE rock called Betty Rock. You could walk out on a bunch of smaller rocks that formed a jetty. We would take our mussels out there and run all over that rock looking for crabs and playing. But we had to be careful and watch the water, because when the tide came in, the jetty was gone and then you'd have to swim for it. When I was little, Betty Rock seemed as big as a house to me. My mom took me back when I was a teenager. It wasn't as big as I remembered it, but still pretty large.
I still remember the day this picture was taken. My cousins Eric and Andrea, who lived in PA, were up to visit my grandparents, so we drove over from our house to see them. It must have been early summer, because my mom had thought it was too chilly to swim. But when we got there, Eric and Andrea were ready to get in the ocean. My brother David was okay...I guess he swam in his shorts, but I didn't have a suit and Andrea only had one, so I just rolled up my pants and played on the rocks that day. I can't remember if I was upset about it (probably not--I got to swim in the ocean every day), but now I'm glad it happened that way. Like I said, this is one of my favorite pictures, and it never would have been snapped if I had gone swimming with David and my cousins. It's one of those pictures that really portrays a moment frozen in time, and I remember that my grandparents always kept a big 8 x 10 copy of it in their house. To me it kind of represents the person I still feel like inside when I am not swept up with mommyhood. It's one of my most sentimental possessions and I will always cherish it.
