I'm having a hard time sitting down to blog the vacation just completed. It's just too expansive, too many, too much. I think I'm better off just chipping away.

Let's start here. That's, left to right, Nora, Tom, Lisa and Lissa on the beach at Chatham, on Cape Cod. As a kid from the beaches of L.A., I didn't really grasp the Cape Cod beach thing until this trip. I've only been once before, in the dead of winter, and it was beautiful but not beachie somehow.

My sister's husband, Tom, spent much of his adult life on Cape Cod, and he did a great job of showing us around, explaining the infrastructure of the tourist world there (he's made his living in that infrastructure since he was a teenager), and then we sat a lot on the beach. Waves. The sound of waves. The smell of sea air. Nothin' like it.

That's my sister Lisa on the left, and daughter Nora, kicking at the cold Atlantic water. It was colder than the Pacific beach water of my youth, and the macho men would dive in to show off for their gals before jumping out with a shiver and shake. But the kids, they are tougher, and the kids splashed and played, body-surfing the slivers of waves and having that great goodness that is a beach as a child.