By Franke Bryant
I remember feeling sand between my toes, looking up at the huge apartment buildings, and talking about how I wanted to live there one day. This place felt like home to me, as I had spent so many days walking along Revere Beach with my mom and sister and riding bikes with my dad along the sidewalks.
I remember sitting next to the water with my sister in the middle of the summer when you could hear thousands of people talking. We were building bad sandcastles that wouldn’t stay how we wanted them to and listening to the crash of waves. The sand was soft and I was too young to understand that you needed wet sand for sandcastles. They were more like sand piles. I eventually got frustrated and bored of sandcastles and decided to go for a swim. The water was cold but I didn’t really care. My mom was yelling at me not to go too far out and my sister told me that a shark would eat me if I did. I felt scared and quickly went back to the shore, not that I was out that deep anyways. I heard the seagulls squawk as we walked back up to the pavilions to get some shade.
A few years ago, I was sitting in possibly the same pavilion as that memory came rushing back to me. This time, not with my mom or my sister, but my niece Jazmine. My dad, Jaz, and I had driven from Maine just to visit for a few days. My dad stayed in the car while Jaz and I walked along the beach and sat in one of the pavilions and I was surprised to see that they were seemingly endless. As a child, I thought there were only a few.
Jaz and I sat on the bench in the crowded pavilion as a man wearing a Vita Coco shirt asked us if we wanted a free bottle of coconut water and then asked, “What flavor would you like?â€. We both picked raspberry lime, which I liked but Jaz didn’t really care for it. I ended up drinking both.
Sharing this place with someone I had known practically my whole life, she’s less than a year younger than me, felt good. I felt carefree, like I had when I was a child. It seemed like the water washed away all my stresses and anxieties. I felt at home and since then, I’ve been waiting to go back again.
I want to share this place with everyone I love. Also a few years ago, I went with my dad, my niece Abby, and my sister. It was rainy so we didn’t really stay long. I’m hoping to go there again this summer for the sand sculpting event, since I haven’t been since I was a kid, with my boyfriend Nick. Making memories with people you love at a place you love hits different.
I think about this place quite a lot when I’m not there. I reminisce about all the things I’ve done here and the memories I’ve made here. I get nostalgic thinking about it all and feel myself calm down. I know I’ll be back there again soon and that makes me happy.
A few years ago I was reading into the history of Revere Beach, just for fun, and found out it used to have a Boardwalk. I remember wishing it still did, how my childhood would have been so much more fun with a ferris wheel and games to play. My views on this have changed and I’m happy that as a child I admired this place for its natural beauty.
This place represents a piece of my childhood and has changed me. It makes me feel closer to the people I have been here with as a child and people I take here now. This place reminds me to care more about the places I visit, because any place can mean what this place means to me. Revere Beach feels like home to me.Franke Bryant is a senior at Ellsworth High School in Ellsworth, Maine and wrote a paper on her memories of Revere
