Tuesday, August 31, 2010

memreeeez

Feeling a little melancholy this week. When I was young, and I mean, from the time I was 5 til was 20...every year me and my family would spend a week in Ocean City, Maryland. We always stayed at the same hotel right on the beach. It wasn't the biggest, the newest, or the fanciest...but after so many years it felt like home.

I can still see the passage of my youth right on that beach in my mind's eye...from riding my father's shoulders in the surf when I was still too little to navigate the sea on my own...to playing "Misty of Chincoteague," by "trotting" back and forth at the water's edge, neighing for my herd-mates still across the channel (my poor parents must have been mortified). Later, wave-surfing on tummy-chafing rough rented rafts...and even later...meeting boys in beach bars and making out with them on the sand.

We always went the last week of summer, leaving right after Labor Day - so we would be there for my birthday and I always got to pick the restaurant for that night - usually a crab shack with paper tablecloths and little wooden mallets to smash crab claws with, followed by carnival rides on the boardwalk and cotton candy.

I have a significant birthday coming up this weekend...and it has me thinking about birthdays past and being with family...and our vacations at the beach. And missing them both.

These pictures remind me of those times....

Vintage-style Dutch beach, replete with changing tents.

breathing sand

so cliché



Candy Apples

6 comments:

  1. Happy Significant Birthday Miss B.... Remember, it's all in your mind.

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  2. and around my eyes...and in my joints...

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  3. Age is a state of mind. I was just commenting to someone that my Mama is 82 and cussed her heart doctor out today for saying she was 'old'. LOL! She's a pill. Dyes her hair fire engine red and only wears jeans and sneakers.

    I hope you have a very happy Significant Birthday. They're all significant, no? I lost a beloved, precious friend to cancer this year. She was only 53 and every time I even begin to complain, I think about her and what she would have given to have had even one more birthday. And it keeps me keeping on. Blessings!!

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  4. Thanks, Marion. I'm sorry about the loss of your friend. Doesn't it seem that as medicine is supposedly getting better, that people are dying younger than ever??

    It's not so much how OLD I am, as how little TIME there seems to be left. Relatively speaking, of course. I feel like...there are things I've always wanted to do...that...I just may be running out of time to do.

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  5. I have a quote posted on my wall that I love by George Eliot, "It's never too late to be who you might have been."

    Never give up on your dreams! One of my favorite novelists, Harriet Doerr, got her first novel published at age 74! The book, "Stones for Ibarra" won the American Book Award. She went on to write two more fabulous books before she died at age 92.

    If you're breathing, you have time. Blessings!

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  6. I read a quote recently...."It's never too late to be what you might have been".

    A good motto I think!

    Hope you have a happy significant birthday!!

    Jayne

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