I visited the County numerous times when I was too young to remember what I’d seen or where I’d been. I first walked on the beach at age 2. We were back on the dunes when I was 5. But my first ‘memory’ of the County is a sort of sensory collage of all the trips we made to Sandbanks in 1979, the first year we lived in Kingston, when I was 7 years old. It’s all smells and sights and sounds. The smell of the paint on the ferry as we crossed over from Adolphustown – that heavy, sweet, metallic smell and the thick, almost soft paint, coat upon coat of it on the railings and floor. The hum of the boat beneath us. Then it’s the parking lot at Sandbanks. The rows and rows of cars, the smell of dry, hot pine needles, of suntan lotion in coconut and baby oil varieties (70’s!). I picture the miles high dunes (miles high when you’re 7!), the push and push of dragging yourself and your bags and towels and coolers and uncooperative lawn chairs up, up and over the dunes while your feet backslide in the perfect white sand. The squint into the sunlight off the water. The wind. The quiet flick flick flap flap of the poplars in the breeze. The full-out run into the lake. When it’s finally deep enough, I collapse into the water and lie suspended and floating for a moment. When I turn around the shore seems so far away.The grit of sand in my mouth while, back on the beach I chomp on handfuls of sour cream and onion chips in still-damp hands. My brother, then 5, nicely breaded with sand – forehead caked in it, eyebrows crusted with it, hands, navy blue polyester swim shorts (did I mention this was the 70’s?) and both legs from the knees down where he’s been shuffling along driving his matchbox cars down the beach to the water. Depending on the day, on the mood of the lake, it was quiet and still and we could watch the little minnows darting in and around the rippled sandy bottom all afternoon or it was rough and ready and would pound us repeatedly with huge waves. Squealing and spitting and coughing and howling in the joy of being buoyed and sloshed about. And those sprawling and beautiful drip sandcastles my dad and I would make. Hours and hours of squishing and dripping the fine sand into towers upon towers. Like a tiny perfect underwater fairy kingdom. Adorned with seagull feathers or twigs or pebbles. At the end of the day the skin on our cheeks was tight from the wind and the sun. Our eyelids felt heavy, puffy almost, from squinting all day long. We stumble back to the car and smell the smoky campfires and the cool night air as it comes in off the lake in the evening. My mother vainly attempts to shake the sand out of our hair and our shoes and our clothes before herding us back in for the ride home.

This is my first memory of the County. Every year from that point on I have travelled to spend time at Sandbanks. Six years ago we moved to Prince Edward County. We live 20 minutes from the beach now and we still book a site there every summer and take our girls camping. Because there is nothing like a campfire by the lake, nothing like that sand, nothing like walking forever along the shore. That’s childhood. And evidently it’s the stuff memories are made of. Mine sure are.