I grew up on the Jersey Shore just a little more than a mile from the beach. My childhood home was officially in Wall Township, so I went to Wall Township schools, but the mailing address for our house was Sea Girt.
Our street, Village Road, was a long straight road which ran between Sea Girt Avenue, which was a main thoroughfare for the area, and West Chicago Boulevard. Where Village Road met West Chicago was the main entrance to St. Catharine’s Cemetery. While I was in elementary school, the road behind our backyard, Gregory Place, was largely undeveloped and slowly being being developed.
Our yard was 170 feet from front to back and 80 feet wide, about a third of an acre in size. In the front yard we had two large maple trees and two dogwood trees, in the back we had two more large maple trees and a magnolia tree. Most of our trees were great for tree climbing. For some time I think we had a plum tree in the back, too, but it died. The backyard was fenced in with a chain link fence, and all along one side of the back fence my parents had planted raspberry bushes. In the center of the back yard was a slightly raised mound of very green grass over our septic tank. When I was in high school we got an out-of-ground pool and built a wooden deck from the back porch right up to it.
From the time I was born in 1976 until 1993, some 17 years, I lived in that house. From there, we moved to a condo in Toms River, NJ, but we lived in a small bungalow on a barrier island in Normandy Beach in between the time that our house was sold and the condo was being built.