In June of 1966, my mom’s parents built a house near the northern tip of Long Beach Island off the coast of Ocean County, New Jersey. It was a vacation house in an unincorporated community called Loveladies, about a two-hour drive from their home in Philadelphia. It was a modest little one-story house of three small bedrooms and a connected kitchen and living area that looked out on what was probably the defining feature: a large wooden deck with a dock on a lagoon. Long Beach Island is a thin strip of barrier island, mostly sand and marsh, about half-a-mile wide at its widest and about half of that up where my grandparents had their place in Loveladies. By the time I was born my parents had settled in California, but every year we headed east for our summer family ritual and spent two weeks in Loveladies with my grandparents and a rotating and assorted bunch of family and friends.