One of my fondest memories as a child is going to the beach; the summers were the best. The
beach was so exciting, lots of things to play with, the clean soft sand and blue water for as far
Every weekend we would pack up my Mom's VW Bug with oversized colorful beach towels,
bags full of buckets, shovels, sifters, rafts and beach balls. There was that old green Coleman cooler, the
metal kind, which had been drug to the beach so many times that it looked like we had purchased it twenty
years earlier, stuffed full of kool-aid and the fattest peanut butter and jelly sandwiches you ever saw. Of
course Mom would always bring one big blanket, the old red quilt that Grandma made, so old and worn,
it didn't even look red anymore.
We would get there at 9:00 to beat all of the others who would arrive at 10:00, we sometimes
thought that it was a race to get the best spot, and you had to be there early to get it. When you stepped out
of the car, the first thing to hit you was the smell of the beach; fishy sea smell mixed with the scent of
sunscreen. A mix of five different radio stations playing at the same time filled the air, the sound of
children laughing and playing, seagulls flying and squawking overhead. If you listened real hard you
could still hear the sound of the ocean waves breaking on the beach.
It seemed like miles from the parking lot to the beach, when in reality it was twenty yards away.
Mom would pile us up with towels, toys and all of those other beach necessities, sometimes you
couldn't even tell there was a child under all of that beach gear, but we didn't care, we just couldn't wait
Finally we would be there, and we would drop all of the gear that Mom had piled us up with and
would make a mad dash for the ocean. The sand was so hot that we thought our feet would burst into
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