I don’t know when I took my first trip to the beach. We lived a 15-minute drive from Manresa Beach and Mom took us every time the fog lifted. Some of my earliest memories are of driving home after a long day of digging for mole crabs (Emerita), the car full of sand and already-broken sand dollar shells, the extent of my sunburn being revealed. How rough the sand which we’d rolled and ran and lounged in all day now felt! I can still smell and coolness of the Noxzema as mom rubbed it on my stinging back before I went to sleep.
Beach life permeated most of my first 22 years (it was easy to move away to Colorado for a piece after that). Sun and sand informs me in ways I forget, which is partly how ‘LPT’ came to be, a lark of a song Kwame and I wrote in the early Bay Station days when we were more purely going with a first-thought-best-thought approach to co-writing. It’s a bit goofy, but I appreciate the reggae-informed song for itself.
Plus, I’ve been in Hawaii this week, so I’ve slipped right back into total beach mode: lounging, people-watching, applying an abundance of SPF 50 sunblock, but still turning over every 30 minutes so my sides get as even as possible, and getting into the water every hour.
Today, a family of four parked it by my bright green beach towel, and the two girls were soon busying themselves with their bright trowels and small buckets. When I came back from a swim, one of the girls had half buried herself very close to the edges of my towel. “Sorry!” her dad said. But I didn’t care. I knew exactly where she was at.
Follow your nose, follow your heart, follow your toes, back to the start