Oh My Lord

My grandsons have sent photos of themselves on the shore I loved all the years of my childhood. It's the first place I have to be any time I return.

Even when I was a teen-ager and crowds in the hundreds hung around the ice cream parlors,
where there was music and jostling and waves of chat and having to be where everyone else was, I could sometimes persuade a friend to walk for miles along the shore, leaning into the wind with the tide always on the move, coming in or going out and the wet hard sand either flat as a table or ridged like the ripples of the waves. I never understood why the sand changed character like that.

Now they are there. They can have no idea how much it means to me that they knew they had to go and see it resembles the Sandbanks on the shores of Lake Ontario in Picton County, the place we discovered when my own children were young and where their family has spent vacations since they were infants sometimes new-born, camping in the Provincial Park.

They are home now with my cousins and the children of my cousins, and the grandchildren and great grandchildren of Aunt Meg and Uncle Davey and whoever else they might meet in the few days they are there, who have welcomed them like the family we are.