salience

Sand is sand, as you would guess.
The water is pollution brown, as you'd expect.
But it's the charm of the place that gets you.

Hyannis is where we (Alex and I) went this past weekend. It's included in the Barnstable area, on Cape Cod. It was my first trip to the Cape, which is silly when you think about it. It is only an hour drive away.

It can be shocking at times, really. We get so caught up in the college bubble that we forget that New England is a collection of a significant number of states, but that doesn't translate into too large of a geographical area.

The beaches are different from those in "the south." The familia only went to Gulf beaches in recent memory and then Virgina Beach in Newport News before that.

It's New England heat, so it's not hot. It was in the upper eighties, but the sun was out, and the water wasn't too cold. We made a point to avoid the college crowd, so we shared sand space with families, retirees and their calm, crocheting wives.

Everywhere is a sense of history, precedent.

We walked amidst the european accents and summer home leasees on Main Street. Even though our restaurant mistakenly called itself TexMex, the shops were quaint, friendly--doors were often kept open to the sea air.

And this verano is weird, being at the beach without the familia was weird. But it was fun. The jokes, the laughing. I didn't want to be anywhere else.

My favorite were the late afternoon moments spent walking to an alcove on the far right side of the beach, past the lifeguards and mischievous kids. There was a pier of large rocks leading out into the ocean we'd decided to climb across. Barefoot we knee-ed our way up and over the jagged edges and unstable surfaces of the first few. Hand in hand carefully placing one foot before the other, until we were at the end.

And you realize just how smooth and strong those final rocks are when you're a foot above deep atlantic water, just how much and how long they've endured. And you stand there, listening to the waves crashing at your feet, feeling the salty wind comb your hair. And you almost wish you had braved your technology into the elements, so you could capture this moment. So you could share what you two are feeling.

It's the knowledge that you left.
You left Alpharetta, GA to do this.
You wanted to push yourself, to create.
A new, unique, college collection.
And that's exactly what you're doing.
This is you now.