Twenty-three years had passed since I spent a summer in my hometown of Gorleston-On-Sea, a quaint, soporific seaside town on the bucolic Norfolk coast in southeast England. My last summer there was on the eve of my nineteenth birthday. I was about to move to London to attend university and finally snip the apron strings that tied me to my comfortable, rural middle class upbringing. Now, as a parent with two young daughters of my own, I felt they should experience what I had taken for granted in my youth. I wanted them to trade the muggy, congested, dusty streets of New York for the tranquil, salty air and rolling green cliffs of England. Any other parent who had the chance would do the same.

So under a cloudless blue sky and gentle breeze, a few days into my trip, I went on one of my customary morning runs on the expansive golden beach, which was about a thousand yards from my mom’s house. About halfway through, as the endorphins kicked in, soaked in sun and sweat, I felt a beautiful, spacey high. The blur of thirty years vanished, and I couldn’t distinguish the timeline between being eleven and forty-one. It didn’t really matter. The surrounding smells and feelings were so familiar. I completed the run quickly, hardly noticing my feet moving on the sand.