Growing up, I would walk along the beach in Connecticut or down the Cape or coastal Maine, right at the tide line where the ocean meets the sand. The waves lap over rocks and seashells, and every few steps I’d bend down to check one out and maybe take it home for my collection (even now, I still open little boxes and purses in my bedroom at home that have been hiding in corners, and find pieces of shells, with a few grains of sand nestling in the edges). It seemed to me that the ocean made the land move, making more of it at low tide and then taking over again as the tide crept high.