I woke up today thinking a lot about Rhode Island. When we were kids we rented a house every year in Charlestown, RI. It wasn't on the beach, but it was only 5-10 minutes away and it was within walking distance of a little inlet or bay area that we used to walk to at night.
Today I find myself missing everything Rhode Island or at least what Rhode Island means to me. I am pregnant so I think its fairly normal that the first thing I thought about was the warm, cheese danishes from the Charlestown Mini Mart. Maybe you don't think you would find the most amazing cheese danish you ever had at a mini mart, but you are mistaken. They make them fresh in the morning and you literally have to get there early, like 6-7am and wait in line to purchase them. They are phenomanal and luckily I have always had a father that was awake at around 5am, so we were guaranteed to get some.
I also remember perfectly, the house that we rented and its familiar smells as we unpacked for our week and sometimes two weeks each summer. The wood stairs brought you upstairs in the house to the kitchen, living, dining room area which had this almost 70's yellow and cream tile that was covered in sun spots near each of the sliding deck doors that led to a huge wrap around deck complete with hammocks and plenty of seating areas. I learned to iron on that deck one year. There wasn't an ironing board and my dad taught me how to iron on the deck rail on top of a towel. Ha, thankfully, I have since forgotten how and now my husband does it.
I remember my sisters and I spent many nights sitting watching black and white Elvis movies on the small TV in the livingroom because there was no cable. This of course was after we would walk or drive down to the Tropic Frost, which was named Anderson's when we were very young, for some of their homemade ice cream. We would sit and eat our cone at the picnic tables on the side before we started our trek home.
Misquamicut beach was the beach we frequented as kids because there was a boardwalk and lots of stores to occupy us when we would eventually want to go home. My dad could live on a beach and now both Carla and Alyson could too. I am a little more like my mom, I get sun poisoning and need an umbrella after a while. However, mom and dad or as we got older, the three of us girls would walk down to the board walk area and get soft coffee ice cream cones and explore the stores. It would buy my dad another hour or two at the beach where he would sleep as he turned black.
Another beach memory I have is of my parents listening to Bob Marley or Peter Tosh on the little radio we brought every year while playing scrabble. In the early years my dad would sport a speedo and my mom a string bikini. They were young and so were we. Thankfully, our father got out of that habit as we got older and more embarrased! There are whole Bob Marley albums that remind me of the beach and my parents.
On our way to the beach we would stop at the corner deli, which is not really on a corner at all. We would order our sandwiches topped with the best creamy italian dressing we have ever had. The dressing is so popular that in a recent trip to the Corner Deli, the owner would not give me extra dressing, despite me asking for it and offering to pay for it, as it was almost time to close down for the season and he needed to get through the day with what he had. I wasn't thrilled. Anyway, us girls would always get IBC rootbeers in the dark brown glass bottles. If it wasn't for the dressing we probably would have gone elsewhere, but we can't find it anywhere else!
At night we would go to the nearby towns. In Narragansett, we wandered the stores and walked along the wall next to the ocean. In Watch Hill, we rode the old fashioned carousel with the rings and ate ice cream sitting on the wall next to the bay. For as long as I can remember I always walked to the back parking lot behind the carousel and would stand at the chain link fence and watch the lighthouse spin its light into the water for the boats.
When we needed a break from the beach, mom and dad would take us to the Umbrella Factory which is a collection of stores on a dirt pathway through gardens that ranged from art to antiques. Back then and this could be accurate now, there was the reggae store (Small Axe) where you could buy jamaican things including music which my parents loved. There was a store where there was nothing but toys, old fashioned candy and stationary where us girls could browse for the day. And oddly enough there free roaming peacocks and sheep you could feed for a quarter. For some reason, I hated the Umbrella Factory as a kid and would protest our trip there, however, to this day, I cannot figure out why. Most likely, I wanted to spend a quiet afternoon on the couch with a Babysitter Club book!
And I remember Theatre by the Sea. Where my parents would drop us kids off for an afternoon of theatre, usually involving puppets, while I believed they were going off to spend the day at the nude beach, which I coined the "n" beach early in life. We were appalled and did not want to go to Theatre by the Sea, but we were not going to sit on the bathing suit side of the fence while our parents bared it all on the "n" beach. So the theatre it was!
Lastly, there was Daddy's Bread. The only place I have ever been that runs a business on the honor system. You pull up to this little white house and walk in the front door. There are bakers racks of fresh baked bread and a note that basically tells you, you are being trusted to put the money in a hole cut out of a desk. There is a book left for you to sign and tell them where you are from if you would like. Each year we would go and get a couple of loaves and eat them for breakfast over our week there. I always wondered if anyone was dishonorable while there and I always worried that if they could not hear our dollars dropping into the hole, would they think it was us? In any event, we enjoyed every bite of that bread.
Today I miss Rhode Island. I would like one day to take my growing family there for a week to a house we find, close to the beach and recreate for my kids all the things I loved when I was kid.
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