Recalling The Jersey Shore

This Saturday Morning marks the beginning of the Labor Day Weekend which for many brings the unofficial end to Summer 2024 and the official beginning of Local Summer. In places like the Jersey Shore, where I resided happily for many years with my late husband, Rich, this is a very special time of year.

With the true end of summer not occuring until weeks later, those who live in summer resort areas like the Jersey Shore revel in the still-warm temperatures and less crowded restaurants, bars and beaches when all the tourist and part-timers have returned to their post-summer lives and a new school season begins.

Rich, loved this time of year. Although, like me, he was born in Northern New Jersey, he spent most of his life vacationing at the Jersey Shore in places like Seaside Park as a kid and later in the Cape May area where he eventually purchased a home long before I met him.

At the time we met, he was renting in the small riverside community of scenic Brielle. It was a great life, we could walk to a number of venues to eat with proximity to many hopping and happening beachside watering holes. And we did. Often!

I was still living in Hackensack running an art studio out of my home and in the summer, exhibited and sold at many Jersey Show outside events. This weekend always brought our favorite event at Seaside Park, once one of the premeir outdoor Fine Arts and Crafts shows in the entire state. Entry was very competitive, but Rich helped get me in to that show where I sold to a very loyal art-loving base for thirty years! That show represents a treasured time when my aritist friends and regular clients converged one block in from the beach.

Rich and I even got married on the Manasquan River on a boat and after living in Brielle for a year, purchased our first home together in Ocean County. I was now officially a Jersey Shore Girl. We loved our log home and waterfront community in Brick, New Jersey. But, as taxes went up, and life happened, we sought warmer temps and a gentler lifestyle in the South, landing in Southeast Georgia.

While going through Rich’s belongings, I discovered that he had been brought to the shores of the Metedoconk River in Brick Township, as an infant for a family picnic. Coincidentally, that was just a mile from where our former home was located.

In retrospect, I will always have some regret that we made our move South. Rich came to enjoy his life in our new community there, but I understood he missed a place that he truly regarded as home. It brings me a small measure of comfort we spent some time celebrating our 25th Wedding Anniversary with friends in our old neighborhood on the creek just weeks before he’d pass. I sometimes think he led me to my current life in a log cabin near the water. Sometimes I think it was an attempt to recreate what I’d “lost”. Funny how that occurs to me now.

I still think of all my friends up in Ocean and Monmouth Coutnies on this weekend, in particular. Weekends and holidays are difficult times for the widowed, even those who have rebuiilt new lives. You can’t avoid the memories. In honor of my years in the art world maybe I’ll even pick up the brush and paint, something I have not done much of since his passing. If I do, I will share!

Whimsical water color with sea glass. A piece I created and now hangs in someone’s home somewhere.

Rich served militarily as a Navy Corpsman, which you might know is the “Doc” for the US Marine Corps, something of which he was very proud. Later, he was loyally employed as a printer with the Amalgamated Lithographers of America, a labor union serving the printing industry. When I met him, he was working for a company that published pet-care books and would often gift me with volumes on dog breeds. He was an authentic person, hard-working and self-sufficient. Those who knew him are better for it.