I write four hundred words of the new novel—a seashore novel—and decide that I've earned a walk
, down to the Devon Horse Show, where anticipation surrounding this evening's Grand Prix runs high.
Shortly after I return, a gift arrives—an absolutely gorgeous hardback history of Stone Harbor, which was "my" seashore during my growing up years and which has in recent times been returned to me by my brother, his wife, and his children. I wrote of my love for this place in
one of my first stories for the Philadelphia Inquirer, and not long afterward, Amy Welsh, on behalf of the Stone Harbor Property Owners Association, wrote to ask if she might include the essay in the Stone Harbor centennial story.
Of course I said yes.
But I did not foresee just how lovely this book would be—the photos, the stories, the personal reminisces, the high-quality design and production. It is an honor to have my words included and an inspiration as I turn the corner on the halfway mark of this novel that still sits here, waiting for me.
Thank you, Stone Harbor, for being the shore I always loved best. And thank you, Amy, for ending your glorious book with my words.
This past Monday, my son and I traveled to the Jersey Shore—Stone Harbor—to see my brother, his wife, and their two children. They've been renting a place there for a long time now, and barring unforeseen circumstances, I join them for a day each year. I took some photographs on Monday for an essay Avery Rome had invited me to write, and today I'm privileged to have the piece appear
here, in the Currents section of the
Philadelphia Inquirer.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.
No, no, no. I was not referring to me. I was referring to my brother, who so generously shares his treasured Stone Harbor vacation with me. Yesterday was our day, and so my son and I set off for the sea. We played, sang to, and analyzed Springsteen all the way there and all the way back, while occasionally speaking of Other Equally Important Things. We Frisbeed (I'm terrible), paddle balled (I'll never be good enough, but don't tell my nephew, who is still holding out hope that Aunt Beth will work her way up to worthy beach companion status), walked (at this I succeed; just ask me), jumped waves (or stood near them), ate (anything we wanted, thanks to all the calories we'd burned), left books behind (no, not my own; what kind of ego do you think I have?), and ice creamed (Springer's, of course). We did not buy a hermit crab at Hoy's, and I am pleased to report that at one point during our Hoy's shopping spree, my brother stopped festooning our heads with bad hats.
On the beach, mid-day, my brother, one of the world's great math guys (I kid you not), entertained us with this first-rate sand hill. I'm sure there's a quadratic tucked into the design, though I wouldn't know a quadratic if it up and splashed me. Still, my mathematical deficits do not dilute my enthusiasm for our sacred day at the beach.
It was wonderful. Thank you, Jeff, Donna, Miranda, and Owen.
Tomorrow morning, I'll take care of a little business, wrap up the final chapter of my
Dangerous Neighbors prequel, and then pick up my father for a Jersey shore adventure; we're going for the day to visit my brother and his family. It's a spur of the moment thing, but not really—my family has been visiting Stone Harbor for as long as I can remember. Here, in fact, is my brother, sister, and me. I don't know why, but I always loved that red suit and its fashionable collar.
I have spoken about
Small Damages, due out from the incredibly terrific Tamra Tuller of Philomel next summer, as my Seville novel, and that is true; much of it takes place within a
cortijo outside the city, and memories of the Spanish Civil War are resonant and haunting. But
Small Damages is built on flashbacks, too, some of which reach back to a certain Philadelphia suburb and the nearby shore.
I am thinking about tomorrow as I post this excerpt, then. I am thinking about all the memories I have that led me toward this passage:
Ellie is wearing her same orange bikini from the ninth grade. She’s slicing the beach air with her skinny bones. She’s the first thing you see, across the wooden planks, over the sand dunes.
You don’t see ocean or umbrellas or sock kites let up into the sky. You see Ellie—the dark black fringe of her hair, the Popsicle orange of her bikini, the bright Barney flip-flops on her feet. You see the spinning disk of the flopped gold hat she’s been wearing since she was twelve. You see Ellie, beach artist, carving out her sculpture of the day, finding her spot at the high-tide line, where the sand goes from wet dark to light. She tests her mix, crumbles fistfuls, gets the sand all clumped together. “Oh, my precious mortar sand,” she says, and she shovels that sand out and piles it high, digging trenches all around so that she can win against the sea, and making you guess, making you wait, and you go out into the ocean and sleep on your raft, or you play horseshoes and Frisbee or toss, or you fall asleep beneath the tent of a paperback book, and all along, Ellie is working on her sculpture, like it is the most important thing there ever was, like she will never ever have to decide what to do with a baby she didn’t expect to have too soon.
“I need clamshells,” Ellie says. “I need those little twiggy sticks.” Whatever. Ellie is a sand sculpture rock star—carving out sand cars you can practically drive, packing out mini roller coasters, tattooing the beach with these funny cartoon faces, and going at it all afternoon. You can never leave the beach until Ellie is done. You can never see what is coming. You will never know where her ideas came from, or how she figures out the physics of the sand.
(my younger sister, my older brother, and me,
the Jersey Shore, years ago)
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 :)
"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.
Excellent 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.
Black-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.
My own Jersey summers were at Budd Lake, but my younger cousins spent theirs at the Shore. I loved this piece, Beth.