Seaside Like You’ve Never Seen it Before

When most southerners think of the beach, their mind resides in Seaside. The same families go year after year, creating a sense of community and escape in this tiny coastal town. The first time I ever stepped foot on sand and ran into the big blue sea, I was two years old, and I was in Seaside. While I enjoyed growing up at this beach for countless summers, eventually my family stopped making the drive over every August, for we do live in a beach town in south Florida and have a refuge of our own. There was a period when we did not visit the beach house for many years, but this summer we came back for a week and I brought my best friend with me, too. I saw this place with fresh eyes: instead of just seeing kids building sand castles and parents bustling around with wagons, I now saw rows of perfect white buildings lining the beach, palm fronds creating a stunning walkway for us to run through with long dresses, symmetry in the porch overlooking the ocean, rows of checkered umbrellas dotting the sand. Everywhere I turned was an opportunity to create and to take a magical photograph. I felt like a little kid running around a playground. It is the most captivating feeling to revisit a place years later and approach it with a new lens, for here, I am a much different person than I was years ago, and I place value on new things in a contrasting way from how I did before. The same beach house I’ve stayed in all my life, the same paths I traverse, the same powdered sugar white sand that squeaks under my feet… this place has not changed. It remains an oasis that I know I can always come back to, and I know will always provide new inspiration for me whenever I return.