Prouts Neck: a memory

There was a time when my first memories of summer always began and ended on that salty lane in Maine. It's been years since I've been back, but the smell of sea salt in the air unfailingly draws me back to the feeling of being chin deep in the wild abandon of pure summer.

I do not always think of the beach as a sunny expanse of silver white sand. For me, the ocean deserves a more wild profile: seaweed tangled between toes at high tide, sea glass found buried in caves during low tide. Growing up, my siblings and I built ourselves beach forts out of driftwood and kelp, building walls from beach stones and using wet sand as mortar. It was child's play, but we sensed that there was a depth and importance to our tasks.  In the same way that the lobsterman boarded his boat  every morning, so we spent the summer barefoot and in bathing suits, subduing the wildness of the coast by building castles and digging for shells. 

It was our work. 

photos snapped in Prouts Neck, Maine, July 2010.