1. Summers, I lived in Green Harbor, Massachusetts. In our tiny cottage, where we slept on cots in the screened-in porch when the aunts visited, where we spent long days on the beach —collecting shells and sea glass, studying horseshoe crabs and washed up jellyfish — where we walked barefoot, the soles of our feet toughened into leather, where no one had a phone and we didn’t own a television, where we listened to the Red Sox on the radio atop the mantel, where a steak on the grill was a gourmet meal, where the sunsets over the marsh could shatter your heart into pieces—I grew up. 

2. Before so many cottages crowded together, there was sand and beach grass. Cottontails and beach plums, their spiny plants growing wild with abandon. We discovered them one summer, with Aunt Theresa, the red berries bursting open in the steamy pot, the jelly thick and red in small jars labelled with her teacher script. We at it on toast, a mix of salt and sour and just a little sweet.

3. At one end of the beach, the jetty juts into the water, creating the passageway for boats headed back to the marina. On the jetty, where we fished and learned to dive, scraped our legs against barnacles and cut our feet, where at the end of the jetty I liked to sit and read books or watch the horizon, where, on a clear day you can see all the way to Provincetown, and at high tide, the waves crash against rock, you can imagine you’re the  only human in a world of sea and stone. You can imagine there are so many ways to be in this world. You can even think: this is where mermaids begin.