To the west was the city, towers of steel and concrete that dwarfed even the tallest man, and to the east was the end, where the air turned thick with the scent of hay and soil until you came to an ocean that stretches so far it seemed to fall off the edge of the earth. The salt burned your nose and turned your hair brittle, knotting and tangling it in the breeze that swept off the sea.

But I was not there at the end of the world, instead I had gone north to the sound. Following the twisting roads whose route I had memorized as a child. The radio playing Carole King as though an ode to my mother and the summers she drove under these same canopied trees, past houses of hydrangeas and dahlias until she reached the beach.

I sat along the fence that separated the public from the rich— where lilacs grew thick through the hedges and all I could see were the tiny huts of pale pinks and yellows and blues, a distant memory of the 60s.

The coast was a rainbow of umbrellas and mingled among the sound of the gulls crying and the waves hitting the shore was the laughter of the children and the motors of passing boats.

The cliffs of a nearby port town curved around me, a barrier from the rest of the island. And if I squinted, the grey line of Connecticut seemed almost within reach.

Cirrus clouds lined the sky, intermingling with the foggy blue that melded seamlessly into the water. I felt as thought I was underwater at times, the haze from the heat and the sun blinding as I looked up through the blue to the world above.