Feeding My Addiction to Sandy Beaches

This post is in response to this week’s Remembe(red) prompt over at The Red Dress Club. We were told to write about sand…

Growing up in South Florida, I have spent many a day with the warm sands of Miami Beach between my toes. I’ve walked along the sandy beaches of Key West during hundreds of sunsets. I’ve used my monkey toes to dig sand dollars out of the superfine, sugar-white sands of Naples…

Sand is to my life what snow is to Northerners, what dry heat is to those in the Southwest, what icebergs are to Alaskans (at least, that is the mental image I come up with when I think of Alaska. Doesn’t everyone have an iceberg in their backyard?). Sand is just part of the scenery, part of the habitat, part of life.

I’d like to say that I have spent so much time on various beaches in my lifetime that I take it for granted. But I don’t. I see the ocean and I immediately get that itch to kick off my shoes and dig my toes down deep.

There is simply nothing like the feeling of warm sand on the soles of your bare feet.

A few weeks ago, my husband, daughter and cousin and I went to Bradenton, Fl. to visit my husband’s grandfather in the hospital. We rented a cute little cottage on Anna Maria Island, within walking distance to Manatee Public Beach, which is part of Holmes Beach.

The sand? It was divine. White, soft, almost sugar-like. Only a few hundred miles away from Miami Beach, but that sand along the Gulf Coast is a world apart from the sand on our beaches on the Atlantic side of Florida. Our sand at home is course, grainy – it is literally chunky with broken shell pieces. In Bradenton, the shells wash up whole on the beach, piles growing higher with each gentle push from the incoming tide.

I was mesmerized. I took a gazillion pictures…