East Coast Summer Diary, June 🌀🦪🍋🦐🐚
Long summer days on Long Island, a road trip to coastal Massachusetts, abandoning the stove for the grill, working on my pickleball backhand...
When my friend Emily invited us up to her mom’s beach house in Massachusetts, it was an instant yes. I had never really been as an adult, her mom had just built a stunning home, and a girl’s trip sounded like just the thing to ease some work stress and go on a fun, not-too-pricy vacation.
Emily and I lived together in a beach apartment last summer, and since then, I’ve felt closer to her than ever— we’ve read all the same books, keeping each other updated on each read via lengthy voice note exchange. Our Goodreads accounts are near duplicates of each other’s. She knows how much I love Elin Hilderbrand’s novels set in Nantucket— I’ve never been, I’m positively DYING to go…
We weren’t able to make it on our visit, so Emily brought Nantucket to me. 🥲
When we got in at 2:30 AM (after a nightmarish several hours stuck in traffic in Connecticut), Emily’s basket of regional treats made it all worth it.
While I’ve never been a “blueberry vodka” type, Emily swore this Triple Eight Nantucket Distillery vodka, infused with blueberries, was to die for. She made me a spritz with the vodka poured on the rocks, a splash of sparkling water, a squeeze of lemon and a sprig of mint, and it was to die for. We drank them all weekend, palms clutching plastic wine goblets full of sparkly purple delight, giggly with glee when we could bring our drinks into the hot tub.
I saved Elin Hilderbrand’s final novel set in Nantucket, the newly published Swan Song, for our Massachusetts beach day. Emily handed me a crisp beer from Cisco Brewers on Nantucket and a bag of Nantucket Crisps— the Madaket Sweet Onion flavor, exquisite. I read my Kindle while the waves crashed and I felt positively bubbly.
In Elin Hilderbrand’s novels, she writes beautifully of food and of restaurants— particularly in Blue Bistro, but even more so as a general rule. I’d oft-read about Nantucket restaurant Cru, and their exquisite “crucumber”— Grey Goose, hand-pressed cucumber juice, sesame syrup, lemon juice and lemon balm. Emily prepared for our arrival by painstakingly preparing all the ingredients. When it came time to drink our crucumbers, I squealed with delight, Emily’s borrowed “Nantucket” sweatshirt pulled over my swimsuit and shorts.
We did nothing and everything during our long weekend: hitting the beach, grilling every night, the dining table laden with
-inspired lobster & tarragon salads, grilled zucchini with tangy, spicy feta, homemade pizzas fired on hot stones on the grill. We played pickleball for what felt like a full day, stopping only to pick up Cranberry Gobblers at a cult-owned bakery. We hot tubbed for hours and then spent the rest of the night in plush, new Parachute robes— a luxury worth noting on its own— sipping our blueberry vodka concoctions. Mostly, we talked. We talked for hours, for days really— we started talking when we got in the car to head up, and we didn’t stop until we’d gotten home and closed the doors behind us. We talked about everything under the sun. (Yes, even you!)
Everywhere I looked there were sun-washed wood shingles and hydrangeas. It was a visceral, vivid East Coast experience— summer is simply not like this in California, where I’m from. Even in on Long Island, where I live these days, there’s a tenor to summer in all its East Coast Glory that eludes even the most soft white sands of Malibu.
We listened to my summer “Girlhood” playlist all weekend, because at the end of the day, that’s what the entire time felt like: cooking for and cleaning up after each other, watching the new Netflix show about the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders into the wee hours, belting to Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter at the top of our lungs. All of us quite different people, woven into the fabric of each other’s girlhood, caring for and tending to each other every second of the way.
I returned home to Long Island, which I had just— almost begrudgingly— started to feel had some real charm of its own, wishing that there were more hydrangeas, and missing the constant chatter of a group of girls. 🪻
Girlhood (summer version):
Make a Crucumber at home…
Wear a nice sunscreen, always. Do as I say, not as I do… we all got lobster red on Day 1. I’ve been really liking this one for face, from Dune! It’s very on sale right now. If you don’t believe me, see what I texted my mom about it.
Eat as many Nantucket Crisps (Sea Salt & Vinegar) as humanly possible. New goal: I must try the South Wharf Cocktail Sauce and Hummock Hot Honey flavors, both new to me! Revised goal: I must go to the Nantucket Crisps store they just opened on Nantucket!
Have a sleepover with your friends, I don’t care how old you are. Wear robes. Talk about nothing and everything. 🤍
Make a version of
’s Lobster Cobb. We just threw together lobster, fresh lettuces and tarragon from the garden and a little blue cheese. The dressing was a simple rosé vinegar, Brightland lemon olive oil, plus a hearty squeeze of a real lemon, honey, salt and pep.
I have quite a few nice things to say about spending your young adulthood in New York City, and quite a few less-than-nice things to say about how I feel about living there now. (See below.) But what this summer has really elucidated for me is that New York— rich in $27 martinis, greasy and delicious smash burgers, 4 AM last calls and a parade of Gen Z’ers in unimaginably indecent outfits smushing onto the train to get back to Alphabet City before sunrise— is devoid of so many of the essential human qualities that make for a happy life and happy body. Chief among them: play.
Yes, you certainly can play in NYC! I ran an amateur office kickball league for three years out of desire to play, and that’s where I met my boyfriend— I needed subs and my friend Sophie brought her best friend from high school along to sub. Subs usually had so much fun they came back again and again— many of them are my closest friends today. I looked forward to something, I got experience motivating people before I managed people for real at work, we all felt like a part of something. We met people outside of our tiny neighborhood or work bubbles, and while we were definitely drinking a lot of disgusting Turkey’s Nest margaritas out of styrofoam cups on the field, we didn’t necessarily need the dim lights of a bar to forge relationships or flirtationships— we just needed the spirit of play, a willingness to get a little muddy, embarrass oneself, to throw our heads back and laugh. In a world where people feel as though they can only realistically find partnership through a dating app, play is deeply lacking.
This summer has been rich in play, my friends and I joke often about the agenda of the day including “gameplay”— volleyball, playing HORSE in the pool, pickleball practice after school work.
Whatever you think about Ty Haney, she was onto something with the idea that we should all get moving, be “doing things,” whether we’re proper athletes or not. A sedentary life is sort of the American condition, and while New Yorkers famously walk everywhere, and I miss my sky-high step count, play is harder to come by— especially as you get older and your social life shrinks from having roommates, to living alone, to living with a partner. Playdates with your friend group in the park tend to dissolve as folks move away, grow more distant, work crazy hours, want to “bed rot” on a Saturday…
It can be done, nurturing play in a big city like NYC. But you sure have to put in the elbow grease to make it happen.
Living at the beach, the play just happens. The whole experience is play. It doesn’t just make my body happy— it makes my mind happy.
The spirit of play is so fleeting as an adult. There is no more knocking on the door of the cul-de-sac: “can so-and-so come out to play?” There is no more kick the can or hide and seek. Add in living in a metropolitan city or far from a park or without a backyard, and you have nothing but barrier to entry for employed, childless adults.
I grew up raised by sporty parents who were all about play. My dad would go for a 60 mile bike ride and then we’d go play soccer or tennis in the park. We had a badminton net! A trampoline! We were always moving, playing. My parents, who have very high stress entrepreneurial jobs and are in their early 60s, have, until just now, still had me very well beat when it comes to play. I’m starting to look back and wonder when I went from always active and moving to more sedentary and depressed. (I don’t want to necessarily equate those things or be too simplistic about depression, but at the same time, I think we have maybe over-corrected on the political correctness about the correlation between physical health and mental health— it’s kind of an indisputable fact that movement, fresh air, good food have a good impact on mental health in the macro sense. At the very least, even if you can’t admit that more play or more movement might help you, you can admit it likely won’t hurt you.)
Somewhere, the New York lifestyle— 3 Negronis after work, an important new cacio e pepe restaurant, the return of cigarettes, sitting all day— kind of defeated play. I lost play. After that, the dominoes started to fall: slowly losing shape, slowly avoiding exercise, slowly not eating healthily, slowly accepting my life sitting in a chair staring into a screen all day. Covid, of course, complicated all those things, so who is to say for certain how related to the loss of play they were— but I’m brave enough to wager that in my case, at the very least, there’s correlation.
I think play kind of makes life worth living.
Play has returned to my life, and with it a lot of other positive feelings, self-regulation, and delight in what my body can do… why, God, would I ever go back?
Dear reader,
I’ve written relentlessly about the power of summer to transform, about how in my lowest, most challenging moments, I fled to the beach to find some peace, rediscover myself after failure, lick my wounds and start anew.
That was years ago, and a different beach than I call home now, but the sentiment stands: I leave for the beach exhausted, miserable, unhappy in my city life, and within weeks, I’m transformed into a different version of myself, a better version of myself, with better hair, better skin, a stronger body. I leave behind the version of myself that feels pressure to network, to be active in certain circles for the sake of my career— you couldn’t pay Summer Me to drag my ass to a founder breakfast, rooftop happy hour or co-working day at WeWork.