My son, Ben, was 5½ years old in the photo on the left. My husband, Tom, is pictured on the right … 24 years earlier.
I grew up less than 10 miles from the ocean — San Francisco’s Ocean Beach was our closest access point, down the road from the world-famous Cliff House.
But, as often happens when we’re young, I never really appreciated that.
Maybe it was because every time my mother drove my sisters and me (and sometimes a friend or two) to that beach, we had to spend a lot of time cleaning off the dark oily sand from our legs before climbing back in the car.
In later years, as beach conditions in the city got worse, my mom started driving us to Half Moon Bay — about 25 miles down the coast. The sand was white … and we even got to see migrating whales during one of our visits!
But it wasn’t until I was an adult, visiting a friend, that I realized how much I missed the ocean.
Twenty-five years after that ocean visit with my friend, I was at Stinson Beach (Marin County) with my husband and 5½ -year-old son.
It was our second visit to the beach that summer, and it was probably then that I realized how lucky we were to live within a few hours’ drive of the ocean.
Now, every time I visit an ocean beach, my gratitude grows even stronger.
One of the many tide pools that stretch along the beach in Mendocino County’s MacKerricher State Park — the same beach where my husband was building a “sand quarter” in the top photo. My son was at Stinson Beach in Marin County.
