I was standing outside our family beach bungalow at the Jersey Shore, watering the garden, when a neighbor greeted me as he walked down the road.

“Was your mother Agnes?” he asked.

“Yes, I replied, “I’m Kate.”

“Your mother was a gem,” he said, introducing himself. “I miss talking to her.”

“We miss her too.”

All the old timers in our little summer community knew my parents. They were among the pioneers who bought a tiny house when Ocean Beach opened in the late 1940s, an affordable new development for working class and middle-class families. Back then, my father, an English teacher, was the only dad with a college degree. My parents never missed a summer here. In July 2017, when my elderly mother went into the hospital from this house, everyone came by to ask about her.

After my mother died at 95, my two siblings and I inherited the bungalow. Mom put it in her will that we could never sell this place. It had to stay in the family. When my mother married my father at 20, she moved into the house in Paterson where he grew up. But the beach house was “their” home because they had bought it together in 1949, the year I was born.

Now I live here by myself most of the summer, except when my niece stays with me. I wanted to make it feel like my home, put my personal stamp on it without taking away the imprint of my parents. I knew my siblings and my nieces would be upset if I took down the kitschy wall decorations my parents had hug in the living room and alcove and kitchen. So I left them but it’s not my taste.

Prominently displayed in the living room is a framed paint by numbers scene of a light house that my sister did as child. My parents hung it like it was a Van Gogh. In the alcove are two mirrors decorated with shells, a wooden plaque with the John Masefield poem “Sea Fever” (a poem I never liked), and a clock that resembles a porthole. Two good paintings (more lighthouses) get lost among the kitsch. The kitchen has plastic plaques with sayings like “bless my little kitchen.”

Since I live in Westbeth Artists Housing, my apartment is filled with real art, paintings and drawings and mixed media from my accomplished neighbors, who have work in major museums and galleries. What could I do here in the bungalow? I settled on fixing up my bedroom with real art I found at yard sales. It seemed like a good compromise. I wanted to replace the living room curtains with blinds, but my mother put up these window dressings, so they remained.

The first summer I stayed in the bungalow after my mother died, I really missed her. I looked at her reading chair and expected her to be sitting there. When the house made noises at night, I thought she was getting up to go to the bathroom. I missed our trips to yard sales and to her favorite restaurant on the Manasquan Inlet, where we ate fresh flounder. I wished we could be sitting side by side on our beach chairs reading novels. But it was still comforting to be here. It was home.

As the years passed, I grew to love having the little house to myself. Maybe I was selfish, but I liked having my morning coffee alone and then checking out the garden. My mother meant well but she could be overbearing, always wanting me to do stuff with her, trying to plan my day. It was too much, especially since I’m used to living alone in the City. I still missed Mom but there was a shift.

I sought out liberal friends in this red county. I spent more time with my remaining family. Summer is the season we reconnect. My sister has her own cottage nearby; we chat on her screened-in porch. My brother lives year-round at the shore, off-island. He drives over and we go for a swim.

This past Memorial Day weekend, my grandnephew Casey and his girlfriend, two artsy hipsters from Brooklyn, stayed in the bungalow with me. Casey adored my mother and she’d be thrilled I was hosting them.

Sunday dinners

Four generations have enjoyed our Jersey Shore beach bungalow, where I spent every summer of my childhood and adolescence. We settled here before the Jersey Shore became trendy. The cottage reminds me of my family and Sunday dinners around the maple drop leaf table that we opened and folded up after we cleared the dishes. Space was tight. My sister and I shared a bedroom, our twin beds almost touching. My brother slept on a pullout couch in the alcove.

Today, my brother plants the beach garden every spring. He puts the same flowers in the window box that my parents liked—red and white-striped petunias and purple ageratum. Our towering sunflowers are the talk of the street. They attract monarch butterflies and people stop to take pictures. I was touched when a little boy walked up to me and said, “Your flowers are so beautiful.”

Unlike our neighbors who tore down their original houses after Sandy ravaged the barrier island in 2012, we held true to our roots. My mother insisted we restore and preserve our tiny two-bedroom home, including the knotty pine my deceased father had installed. Our vintage house, now dwarfed by towering new homes, is a remnant of an earlier era (no dish washer, no washer/dryer). It’s a touchstone that takes me back to a simpler lifestyle. And this also makes me aware of the passage of time.

Last summer, I realized that’s why I feel a little sad when I’m staying here. My parents are gone and I’m not youthful anymore. I look at all the hot bodies of the young women and men on the beach and I think: I used to be one of them. So when I’m down the shore, I feel old. I feel my age. It hits me that I’m no longer the sexy teenage girl with a surfboard and a guitar.

I was sitting on the beach discussing these feelings with my gay friend Ian, who I first met in the 1970s when he worked at the boardwalk in Seaside Heights. He observed, “It’s OK. It’s their turn. We had our day. Now we have wisdom.”

While I have put away my surfboard and guitar, I now take out my ukulele and play in the yard, singing and strumming “Under the Boardwalk.” And today I can even light up a joint there! I don’t miss crouching on the sand at night smoking weed with a college friend and watching out for the lights of the beach patrol jeep. I had to laugh when I read in the newsletter of our HOA that while marijuana was now legal in New Jersey, homeowners were not allowed to grow it.

At 76, I’m the same age the bungalow. I’m retired from college teaching, but still working as a writer and pursuing my lifelong interests in music and photography. I’m in good health but my routines have changed. Since I had skin cancer on my face, I limit my beach time. I sit under an umbrella and use sunblock and wear a big hat. I was turning into my mother who had a collection of beach hats.

Still swimming

At the beach, all ages mingle, but the youth rule. On the sand, young people spread blankets and flaunt their bodies in scantily clad clothes. The teenaged girls wear thongs. I have replaced my bikini with a cute turquoise one piece. I use a grown-up beach chair. I’m happy I can get in and out of the ocean myself. Some people my age need a younger companion to give them a hand.

I take yoga classes that emphasize balance. I want to be like my mother who at 95 was walking to the beach every day and dipping into the ocean whenever she could get someone to take her into the water.

At our Jersey Shore community, I’m friends with the adult children of the people I grew up with. I exchange books with the daughter of my lifelong friend, Sue, who died a few years ago, carrying on our tradition of trading summer reads. While I love spending summertime in a place where I have roots, where people recall my parents, it is the continuum of this specific place, living in the same little house on the same street, East Bay Way, that makes me feel my age.

I came here as a baby, then I was a spunky little girl, and a rebellious adolescent with a summer job in town. I dated the cute boy next door. (Who knew we’d both turn out to be gay?) After I finished college and got my own space, I no longer spent entire seasons at our vacation house, but I returned every summer.

Sometimes I brought my long-term girlfriend, who liked the ocean, but griped that the house was too small, especially the bathroom. She refused to stay more than two days, so I remained and visited my folks while my girlfriend returned to the hot city. (Looking back, that was another missed clue our relationship would end badly.) She did not get “my happy place,” where I took refuge with my widowed mother after the breakup.

Although I love living in the Village (and I don’t feel old when I’m home in Westbeth), I’m trying to spend as much time as possible in my “happy place.” I appreciate this sanctuary even more as our country spins out of control. As another summer began, I arrived at the bungalow, and I walked to the beach and sat on the bench with the memorial plaques for my parents. I thanked them for this gift.