April 27, 2020

I’ll be the first to admit that there are modern conveniences that I really couldn’t live without. There are the real luxuries, like my iPhone, cashmere, egyptian cotton sheets straight out of a warm dryer… and ones that by now, my generation would consider pretty basic; cars with power windows, microwaves, and air conditioning.

“Go Play Outside!”

When I think of my childhood,  I’m nostalgic about those activities that we did because there were no gadgets to occupy our time and our days were not filled with travel ball, dance competitions, after school tutors and the like. We had no choice but to “play outside,” discovering all the wonders nature had to offer…

Nature Was Our Playground

I didn’t grow up on the coast of South Carolina, but my family has had a beach house there since before I was born, and we spent most of the summers there, where in the 70’s and 80’s it wasn’t heavily populated and there was still lots of native vegetation. The sand dunes were speckled with dark green shrubs and vines and briar bushes. We walked all over the island and felt like it was our own...and sometimes in the late afternoon we were lucky enough to get a loud, dark blue thunderstorm to cool everything off, it was Heaven uninhabited. It sat on the marsh which gave us hours of entertainment. I never grew tired of crabbing in the inlet, swimming there when it was high tide, or simply watching the little fiddler crabs through the spartina grass, darting busily back and forth…

“To describe our growing up in the low country of South Carolina, I would have to take you to the marsh on a spring day, flush the great blue heron from its silent occupation, scatter marsh hens as we sink to our knees in mud, open you an oyster with a pocketknife and feed it to you from the shell and say, ‘There. That taste. That’s the taste of my childhood.’ ”

– Prince of Tides