My husband, Mr. Dressed, is a champion gift giver. Truth be told, he stresses about it before every birthday and holiday, but the man has skills. He will occasionally pull something from my wishlist, but more often than not he will brave the cyber streets and find something I never even knew I needed. He’s amazing at pushing me out of my comfort zone or finding a stunning vintage piece that reminds me of just how well he knows me.
Accustomed to his gift-giving prowess, several months ago, my curiosity started to pique as my birthday approached. Unbenounced to me, the Mister actually arranged for a huge mind-blowing surprise, where my best friend flew in to shock the pants off me. As this was pre-isolation, we had a blast showing her our new house, touring around some of our favorite Wilmington haunts, watching the best bad movies we could find (anyone else remember Teen Wolf???), and an amazing dinner out with still more friends.
I’m sure you can imagine the warm fuzzies swirling around me when I woke up on my actual birthday back in March. Fully content with the presence of my favorite people as my presents, I was pretty shocked to see a stack of gifts on our coffee table. With things ranging from sentimental, to stunning, to silly, each gift I opened this year carried with it special meaning. But, Mr. Dressed really outdid himself this year with a present that I don’t think has ever quite had an equal. In the last box I opened, nestled in tissue paper, sat a silver bracelet from Dune Jewelry. Linked together with silver loops, it was made up of a series of round bezels, each a different shade of taupe. Still a bit clueless as to what it was, I read a little card tucked within the box. It turned out, each of the seven bezels was filled with sand and resin from a different beach.
This would be pretty cool in and of itself (given my love for all things aquatic), but this gift got even better….
If you’ve followed this blog for awhile, you’ll know I’ve traveled a LOT in my life, following my love of sharks and adventure around the world towards different opportunities. This has lead to an incredible career, but more goodbyes than I can name. As someone who has always thrown her problems out to sea, it has also lead to bare feet sunken into many beaches in each of those places I call home. It’s lead to running my fingers through countless different sands, brushing off granules after a long, satisfying day in the surf, clambakes and BBQs with friends who were once so much a part of my every day they felt like an extension of myself.
And somehow, my sweet husband found a piece of each of those beaches, each of those parts of me. It turned out, each bezel didn’t contain random beach sand, but actually the literal Sands of Time from my own past. First, from a beach by a lake in Southwick, near the town in Western Massachusetts where I grew up. Another from a beach in Boston, where 18 year old me got her first taste of adulthood in college. The third came from Falmouth, where I spent my first summer internship and climbed up one of many stepping stones into the professional world of marine biology. Next contained sand from a beach north of Auckland, in my beloved New Zealand, where I got my PhD and got to find out who I was separate from my childhood. One bevel over was filled with sand from La Jolla, CA – home of my first postdoc and the city where I met my Mister. Second to last was speckled with grains from Perth, Australia – our home for 5.5 years. And as I clicked to the last circle on the chain, there I found our (hopefully) forever home, with sands straight from where we currently hang our vintage hats in Wrightsville Beach, NC.
Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time
A Psalm of Life, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Time is a funny, funny thing. It’s amazing just how much we can cram into it…and at the same time how months can slide by in a blur of isolation, uncertain how we even got here.
As I made the effort to get dressed this morning in this most perfect trompe l’oeil skirt from Crush Vintage, with her new-to-me petals blooming against a landscape of old (which sums me up really) and the sands of travels past literally clicking onto my wrist, I thought back to everything that has gotten me to this place. The art of packing and moving is something I joke I have a second PhD in. But truthfully, it is a part of me. And though I want nothing more nowadays than to settle and stay in one place (and let’s be honest, never have to pack up my vintage again), my travels have carried me to who I am. I wouldn’t be me without the people and places I’ve had the privilege to call home.
Despite the goodbyes and the airports and a lot of starting over, I’m thankful that I carry those experiences with me on a daily basis. That I am afforded a reminder to never forget where I came from. And that I have been lucky enough to meet and marry someone who understands the value and consequence of the gift of memories. I only have to glance down at my wrist, and I can remember the smell of the salty sea air when I made it to Cape Cod to run my first real experiment, or the feeling of independence as I ran my fingers through the white sand beaches of New Zealand, or finding my way to the shores of the Swan River for a coffee in Perth after a particularly tough day in the lab. We should all be so lucky to carry these experiences with us, and to keep them close, before gently letting them back out to sea to make way for new adventures.
Perhaps that’s the remarkable thing about the ocean. No matter how many coastlines you dip your toe into, it’s all a part of the same ocean, one way or another. Different beaches, different grains of sand, connected by one big body of water. It ebbs and flows and continuously changes, carrying us to new continents and new adventures, but is always persistently, endlessly present. There is fear in the ocean’s inevitability and the way it has and will continue to change, coupled with the comfort is its constancy.
Because home, amidst the change, is thankfully wherever we choose it to be.
xoxo
Outfit Details:
Top: Anthropologie (similar)
Skirt: Crush Vintage (similar modern and vintage here, here & here)
Necklace: Gift, Epuu
Bracelet: gift, Dune Jewelry
Handbag: Cloth Magpie (similar)
Shoes: Cecelia NY
Lip Color: Dior Rouge 634
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Any items marked with a “c/o” (courtesy of) a retailer mean I was provided with an item for free in exchange for a review and/or feature on my blog. I always provide my honest opinion of any item I’m reviewing, regardless of whether it was sent to me as a courtesy item or if I purchased it myself. In addition, this post may contain affiliate links. This means that if you click and/or make a purchase through certain links or ads on this site, I may make a commission from that click and/or purchase at no cost to you, which helps with the day-to-day running costs of my blog.