With each passing day as I grow older I think back on the time as a child by the seashore. The very phrase conjures up a million visions from my own memories-the smell of the salt spray, the warm breeze against my face and the raucous cackling of the white and gray sea gulls or a ghost crab fleeting back into his hole.

Generation after generation of children have searched for shell treasures and built sandcastles on warm sandy beaches. I spend hours playing and creating my fantasy castles, knowing all the while that they would not last.

On our long, solitary and peaceful island beach, I endlessly played in the warmth of the summer and formed memories of this beautiful island; I created with no boundaries and no thought to the responsibility to come. In the future, visions of these childhood days would return to me, and I would realize that these halcyon days of youth were made of sand, just as my castles were, and the sea of time would wash away my castles with each wave of the tide.

But we take these memories and cling to these images throughout our lives-the sandcastles of our youth.

The intensity of the dreams and visions remain, as brilliant as those warm sunlit days, secreted in a chamber in our hearts, giving us strength from the memories of those days. As Edgar Allen Poe wrote "When you were a child and I was a child in the kingdom by the sea".

Sculpture and verse © by

Alyse Lucas Corcoran