Long Bay Beach

Breakfast was always late at the little hotel on Long Bay beach, partly because everything runs late in Jamaican time, partly because the hotel's excellent little seafood restaurant worked long into the night. It wouldn't have mattered except we would be woken betimes by a small girl who was hungry but also wanted to be out in the bright clear morning sunshine upon the pristine beach that ran to right and left in front of the hotel. So her mother fed her the snacks we always brought against this eventuality and I would spend a happy if hungry hour or so with her building an elaborate sand castle which, we both knew, would be smoothed back into the beach by the next rising tide.

It is like so many things these days: I look at these pictures and feel the yearning to be back in those moments, then shake my head and look at them again, so grateful that fate once allowed us such happiness, such contentment in such a beautiful, peaceful place.