About 

In my selective memory, dogs and beaches connect the past and the present, family and friends, holidays and anniversaries, education and travel. They have influenced every aspect of my life and have taken me from there to here.

IT ALL STARTED WHEN…

… my family lived with a spaniel named Rainbow in a big house near Marconi Beach in Wellfleet, Massachusetts.

Inexplicably, Rainbow was white, black, and brown. We only bathed her twice a year—in a deep, black slate kitchen sink in winter, and on a freshly cut front lawn in summer. Our family traveled in a beige, second-hand Woodie to the sharp grasses on Marconi Beach, where dogs were allowed to run freely during early mornings and late afternoons—a daily ritual for many pets. 

Years later, we had moved to Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. I often sat on the brick steps in front of our Henlopen Avenue cottage and watched our neighbor’s dalmatian, Giraffe, follow our mailman down the street, six days a week. Summer days were marked by Giraffe’s morning travels and by our family’s afternoons on the beach. I was at the beach, looking through royal blue sunglasses decorated with little starfish, when I found my first piece of sea glass—green and frosty—no doubt a beer bottle fragment discarded years earlier, but nonetheless a treasure.

Fast forward to Senrab Drive in Bradenton, Florida. Here, Rebel, our buff-colored cocker spaniel was struck by lightening, but he lived a long life, though, and continued to witness the dependable two o’clock storms that drove beachcombers into their air-conditioned cars, houses, and malls. We never took Rebel to Holmes Beach, but our family, covered in sunscreen that smelled like coconuts, brought him treats from the local food emporium, Duffy’s hotdog stand. 

During the eleven years I lived in Paris, I couldn’t have a dog. Paris is a city where poodles are not a cliché, so I often saw them sitting on their owners’ laps in cafés that were once frequented by Fitzgerald and Hemingway. Minou, a white miniature poodle with fuchsia-colored toenails that matched her leash, often sat at a table nearby.

I still miss Fiona, a dog I knew in Killiney, Ireland. She appeared at the front door of my rented studio nearly every day, during one graduate school summer. Together we looked for shells and sea glass and hollow sea urchins that regularly littered Killiney Beach. Fiona, with her gray, wiry fur and eyebrows that stuck out like porcupine quills, still figures strongly in my memory.

In my travels, I came to love the Thames in London because it seemed to represent civilization. Everyday, the tidal river exposes artifacts embedded in the anaerobic slime on the banks strewn with garbage and centuries-worth of treasure. From the London Bridge I often watched mudlarks—urban beachcombers—dressed in battered Wellingtons and waterproof trousers scavenging with their dogs. Once I heard a man call out to a black lab, “Alfie, drop it!” and he did… a sludge-covered bone.

Now, I live in Maine, with a coastline more than 3,500 miles long. I was married on a sea glass-strewn beach here. I was lucky enough to care for friends’ dachshunds, Dali and Pico, who loved to run over the rocks at Pemaquid Point with an athlete’s agility. Their descendants, Boris and Heinrich, preferred slow walks on pebble-covered beaches with crab and lobster remnants. Gunter, the incontinent pug doesn’t like the beach, but still watches the harbor from the long wooden boardwalk, which, according to passersby, he appears to own.

“New Morning” video by Hallmark Television Network