Down the Shore

If you need any more proof that I’m a man married to the places and routines of the past (as if the knowledge that I’m still living in my hometown in my grandparent’s house isn’t evidence enough), it’s the fact that I continue to return to Sea Isle City, this beautiful, often-times overcrowded, overgrown sand bar off the South Jersey coast.  I’ve been coming here since I was thirteen.  Our rental that year was a tiny bungalow that crammed six into the same square footage of your average one-car garage.  That cottage has since disappeared under thirty year years of development and exists only in fogbanks of memory.

Bridge into Sea Isle – every year right before we reached the bridge, the smell of salt marsh would fill the car signalling our arrival ‘downdashore”.

The property I rented this year, up the street from the place we stayed three decades ago, housed a…