I live in Maryland and I have since I was eight years old, but people always tell me that it seems like I'm not from around here. I proudly say, "I'm from New Jersey," and I get a laugh and a nod, like, "Duh, of course she is." I can't tell if my DNA is coded for "Jersey" or if I just pick it up like a parasite when I'm around my family, all of them from the Garden State, but no matter -- I am a Jersey Girl disguised as a Marylander and my true nature drips out like a leaky faucet, I can't help it. More specifically, I'm a Jersey girl from the shore, and that little girl who spent her summers at Point Pleasant Beach, NJ and riding the rides on the boardwalk at Seaside Heights is weeping at the destruction that Mother Nature brought to her favorite childhood places. It's difficult to explain to the people around me -- my fiance was born and raised in Frederick, MD and none of my friends are from that region of the country -- but the shore takes up such a huge and vital part of my heart and is the background to most of my memories from some of the happiest moments of my life that seeing it in shambles the way that it is makes me feel weak. It's not like I don't understand the concept of rebuilding after a disaster; I get that the Jersey Shore will still be the Jersey Shore. But, it won't be my Jersey Shore. The buildings will be different, the beach won't look the same, and as things get replaced and reinforced so that the next hurricane won't be as devastating to the infrastructure, it will be less and less the place I remember. When I shared Point Pleasant Beach with Tyler and our one year old son, Eliot, this summer, I had never been more proud. My son was able to ride the same rides that I did, he was able to play on the same beach and see the ocean for the first time in the exact same place as I'm sure I first did. I shared so many stories, some so trivial and irrelevant that they probably weren't even worth telling, but I wanted them to get the point that this place was MY place. I wanted to get across that although my house was miles away in the state of Maryland, where it had been for, honestly, most of my life, the shore was my bona fide home. Even after many years of not going back there, years of turmoil in my family and within myself, being in that place still felt natural. It felt like I had always been there because, frankly, my mind never stopped thinking about it and my heart never left. The Jersey Shore is where my parents still loved each other; where my cousins and my sisters were my best friends; where I rode my first rollercoaster; where I was the most excited about growing up, being one of the cool college girls with boyfriends and bikinis and coolers of adult beverages; where I wrote a nauseating amount of Hanson fan fiction; where my cousins and I pretended to to be the Power Rangers and fought off the ocean as one of Rita Repulsa's evil monsters; where I created the jingle "No pail gets you as pale as a pail, unless you try petroleum jelly," because we were bored and silly; where I walked up and down the boardwalk like I owned the place; where renting a house down the shore was tradition; where Hoffman's donuts and Hoffman's ice cream was the beginning and end to the most perfect day; where Bruce Springsteen was like a distant uncle, telling us stories about the working-class and a young man's hopes and dreams about a better life, but we just giggled at his butt on the CD cover. Tattooed on my right arm is an image of a boardwalk with a Ferris wheel and a sunset; it could be any place with some sand and some ocean and some wood planks and some lights. But, around it it reads, "Maybe everything that dies someday comes back," and that can only be one place.
I love NJ.
