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....