Dear Blog,

Today I was at the beach with my parents. We are staying at our family's house on the beach, as we do for a week every summer. This year it's just me and them, as all my siblings are off doing more important stuff. The weather was nice and so we descended onto the beach armed with chairs, towels, and reading material.

A traditional past time for my family on the beach is shoveling. The most vivid memories I have of this place involve forts and dykes of all shapes and sizes, so it would come as no surprise to hear that I was also carrying a shovel, with the intent to dig something or other. When I was younger I remember being impressed with the large amounts of sand my dad, brother, and sisters were able to pile up using the 'adult' shovel. I normally carried around the kiddie shovel, feeling all important and with the steadfast belief that what I did helped tremendously, when in fact looking back I probably hardly did anything. We often built a dyke to keep water that was running back to sea from getting there, creating a pond of sorts on the beach. Other children would sometimes play in the ponds we built. Sometimes we did this over at the rows of poles dividing the beaches. I can still remember how we would resent the German tourists that considered our dyke a safe bridge to get across. Other times we would create a spiral which would run full of water as the tide came in, other people from the beach would come over to look at what we had made, because obviously it was awesome.

Nowadays when we go to the beach here, it has become a habit of mine to build a dyke surrounding "our" place on the beach. And today, as I set out to do just that I came to thinking about why it is that I like to create some sort of fence around our spot, making it more "ours".  I even wondered why I resented the little boy who was digging way too close to my dyke. I bet a therapist could answer this. What is it with humans and building fences around stuff, and walls and hedges and whatnot. I guess we just like our own space. Maybe back in the day we also wanted to have our own cave, cause it's easier to defend maybe? Who knows.

Anyway I built an awesome dyke.