Where do you find your childhood? Is it weaved into a colorful afghan that you’ve had since you were little, and you can’t part with it? Maybe it’s in yellowed photo albums with those sticky pages or boxes in your basement that hold knick-knacks and treasures from a time not too long ago, it seems. Although, if you’re being honest, it really has been a long time.
How is it possible for decades to pass by without noticing?
Perhaps your childhood is buried in the sand and washed away by years of tides coming in and out along the ocean shore, washing away the memories of sand castles and words drawn in the sand with sticks and fingers. We all keep our childhoods tucked safely away somewhere so that when we need it it’s there to remind us that once we were lighter and freer.
Jekyll’s Driftwood Beach – Photo Credit: Lonely Planet
One of the places I keep my childhood is in damp sand and the salty air of Jekyll Island, a barrier island off the Georgia Coast. Have you been there? I want you to know this place, but at the same time, I hope you don’t because I want it to still be mine. Of course, it never belonged to me like that.
Is there truth in fiction?
That’s what everyone wants to know. What part of the stories I write are about me and the people close to me. The truth is that there’s a bit of me in every story I write, but mostly it’s tidbits of my life that I use to color my fiction to make it more relatable and fun to read. Today, when it’s barely 10 degrees Fahrenheit and I want to get away, I find myself thinking about Jekyll Island.
Photo credit: IG @jekyll_island
About four years ago, I wrote a short story called, Gracie’s Gift. It was for an anthology called, Legacy. The story is about a grandmother who’s raising her granddaughter after the death of her only daughter. It’s a story about family and strengthening the human connection even when people have done us wrong. When I was writing the story, I thought about where I wanted the story to take place. It’s easier when you write about a place you know because you can color the story better. So I chose to Jekyll Island and Brunswick, both places in Georgia where I spent much of my childhood.
My great-grandparents lived on the island when I was very little. It’s an island that was a summer playground in the late 19th century for the wealthy and elite like the William Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, Joseph Pulitzer, William K. Vanderbilt, and Marshall Field. By 1948, it became a state park and laws were put in place mandating that 65% of the island remain undeveloped. As you can imagine, even though the island had houses, beach resorts, a small grocery store, and tourism, it was still a private paradise.
This is Jekyll Island Club Resort. That beautiful porch is where we waited out a summer thunderstorm and around the corner, under those trees, is where we met Shaquille O’Neal a VERY long time ago. My great-grandparent’s house was down the street from this hotel.
Photo credit: IG @jekyllclub
In the early 1980s, my great-grandfather got sick and they had to move inland to Brunswick because they couldn’t risk the drawbridge being up for passing boats if they needed to get to the hospital. They also couldn’t lose time, if needed, driving along the causeway through miles of salt marsh to get to the mainland. So they moved inland where it’s not the salty sea air you smell, but the stench of pulp factories. Still, I loved coming to this place several times a year with my parents and brother and going back to the island, walking along the quiet beaches, and listening to my dad tell stories about fishing with his grandpa off the wharf and going deep-sea fishing.
This is, literally, The Wharf today, but back in the day before it was
a restaurant this is where my dad and great-grandpa fished.
My great-grandfather died shortly after they moved inland to Brunswick, but my great-grandmother stayed in Georgia until I was in my late teens. By then she had gotten sick and moved up to Missouri with us. She died in 1998 when I was twenty-one.
When I was twenty-three, I took my three-year-old daughter and my husband back to the island to share my childhood with them. To create new memories. We came back once a year for a long time and it became our family spot, separate from my childhood but still connected.
Not Jekyll Island, but Cumberland Island, another barrier island where wild horses roam the island and magic exists at every turn. This became a special place husband and girls when visiting coastal Georgia.
The other day I was thinking about Jekyll Island and realized it’s been almost ten years since I’ve walked its beaches. How has it been that long? Life took off and we got busy. I got restless and wanted to see the rest of the world. There wasn’t time to go back to those childhood memories because I was too busy searching for bigger, better things.
I guess, maybe, that’s why I chose the Georgia Coast as the setting for that story all those years ago because I was longing for the salty air and stinky pulp factories. Maybe it’s time to go back.
Would you like to read Gracie’s Gift? You can download this short story here.
