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Remembering Our Beach

This one’s personal. I hope you don’t mind. I’ve been thinking a lot about my pre-Colorado life. I’m a native Texan, but my adult home before Colorado was in Washington state. Seattle to be specific. At the age of 23 I packed 3 suitcases and hopped a plane to a city I’d never visited before, and I set down roots and fell in love. With the help of good friends I found an apartment, a job, a social scene, and myself. I figured out my adult life in that beautiful city. I also met the love of my life and gave birth to my first son there. I recently described my life in Seattle as the “love affair I never got over.” That about sums it up. My vision of my 8 years there is romantic and dreamy and a bit like a watercolor painting.

One of my favorite places in Seattle is Golden Gardens. “Our beach.” Mine and Shawn’s. He’s the first person to show me that beach and every memory I have there includes him. I have the most amazing memories of our beach. We spent long, lazy hours combing the sand for beach glass and watching the sun set. We held our wedding rehearsal dinner at this beach, the sound of the waves and the gulls were all the music we needed. On weekends we would fill big bowls with the delicious blackberries that grew like weeds along the hills nearby. When we lost our first baby to miscarriage, three years later, we found ourselves sitting in our car staring at the ocean and crying. It was the only place we found comfort from our loss. A year later we took our son Jackson there to touch his toes in the Sound for the first time. When my childhood best friend came to visit, tops on our list was taking our two boys, just months apart in age, to the beach for their first ice-cream cone. Our last night in Seattle, our home packed up and ready for the move to Colorado, we once again found ourselves at our beach eating ice-cream cones and again watched the sun set, this time for the last time as Washingtonians.

On our trips back to Seattle we always make time for a trip to Golden Gardens. It is one of our favorite places on this earth and brings me so much solitude. It is the place I can still call home when we are there. Our last visit was a few years ago. The trip was a stressful one for us. Our boys weren’t really old enough to truly appreciate a cross-country road trip and by the time we got to Seattle they were worn out and cranky. We gave up on some of our planned tourist activities and found ourselves back at our beach again… Our son Holden’s first time to see the ocean. It was chilly and grey but it was my favorite day of our two week long adventure. Everyone was happy and content and everything was a bit dreamy, like a watercolor painting.

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Baby & Family Portrait Photographer | Castle Rock, Colorado

 

Amy Stephens | cribtales@gmail.com | 303-520-9188

Serving Castle rock, Parker, Highlands Ranch, Larkspur, Elizabeth, Lone Tree, littleton, monument, Denver, and Beyond.