Just uphill from a thin sliver of Connecticut coastline stood the beach house. A simple 1950s ranch, it didn’t look particularly beachy. With its vinyl siding and chain-link fence, it could have been in Anywhere, USA, but it was a lot closer to the beach than “tar beach,” which was the roof of the Manhattan tenement house where my grandmother, Mimi, and her sisters grew up posing in bikinis.

My grandparents bought the house, but since my grandfather rarely went there, it was mostly a hangout for Mimi, her sisters, and me. Mimi had three sisters who everyone referred to collectively as The Sisters. Neither my mother nor I have any siblings, so without cousins or sisters of my own, I shared The Sisters with Mimi, and they spoiled me silly. I experienced the magic of long summer days without rules, the preciousness of a time where the only thing that mattered was pudding and Bob Barker.

We made pudding every morning and let it set in individual crystal dishes while we did our morning session at the beach. When we got back, my job was to squirt whipped-cream florets on the pudding which we ate while curled up on scratchy wool sofas watching The Price is Right. We had our dessert before lunch, every day.

“What if we’re full after lunch?” Mimi mused, “No use taking chances.”

The Sisters weren’t known for their cooking, so after the Showcase Showdown we made either tuna or egg salad, and ate it off paper plates with handfuls of Ruffles potato chips and mini gherkins on the side. If we wanted cookies after lunch, we had them. We did puzzles, swung in the hammock, or walked down the hill to the beach. The pace was easy, and as a kid it felt like a never-ending loop of awesome.

Sometimes we had weeks on end of lousy weather, and when we did, Mimi took me shopping for art supplies. Watercolors didn’t have enough oomph for my taste, so I moved toward bolder applications of color. I loved the intensity of the richly-pigmented, velvety pastels, and I appreciated the forgiveness of oil paints. I loved the hog-hair brushes as well as the blades, wedges, and palette knives. I loved calligraphy pens and had a thing for paper. Japanese rice paper, the paper with the visible fibers, the paper that was nearly translucent. I loved scratch-paper, transfer paper, vellum.

I loved the heavyweight paper that had two sides—smooth on one, textured with a little bite on the other—and came in packages of mixed colors such as twilight and tobacco, viridian and oyster. The paper was adaptable to an endless array of media and techniques, and strong enough to handle multiple reworkings, though Mimi always encouraged me to save my work as opposed to reusing the paper. “Don’t be stingy with yourself,” she said, “It’s senseless to cover up your artwork.” What Mimi never said to me was anything about her childhood and how poor they were. I was much older when I learned that The Sisters would’ve considered themselves lucky if they’d had a dull pencil and a piece of scrap paper to share between the five of them when they were younger.

I loved sharpening my pencils and keeping the caps tight on my markers. I loved the elephant-colored erasers you could knead into any shape and the pink erasers I desperately wanted to keep pristine. My grandfather saved cigar boxes for me that I used for organizing my art supplies, a task I loved almost as much as making art.

If the weather allowed for it, I made art outside. The beach house had a fenced backyard, and from what I remember it was an irregular shape. Not quite a triangle or a rectangle, but more like the shape of a flat-bottom ice cream cone. There were tall oaks and maples and a chain-link fence. The fence was magic to me, providing both a safe perimeter and the sensation of possibility. When I look at a satellite image of the house now, I can see they’ve changed the fence to something sturdy and white. It no longer goes to the edge the way it did in my memory. In the satellite image, the tall trees look like giant stalks of broccoli.

Some nights the four of us would sit out back and play cards, but the games fizzled out quickly as Helen seemed to be the only one who knew the rules. Years later, while playing cards with friends, I discovered that Helen had made up a lot of her own rules, which made me laugh since that seemed quite rebellious for a woman who didn’t leave home without a rosary in her purse.

I loved swinging in the hammock before the mosquitos came out, but my favorite nighttime activity was running the length of the yard down the hill to the far end of the chain-link fence and back, as many times as I wanted until I was out of breath. Laura Ingalls was my first role model, and after my bath I’d put on a long, white, cotton nightgown, just like the one I pictured her wearing. Mimi held open the screen door for me, and I’d stiffen my arms like wings as I tore out the door and into the night.

I ran through the pain of stepping on twigs and acorns because otherwise it felt like I was cheating myself. My long hair wrapped around my face and I closed my eyes because trusting my instincts was an act of faith, and my body knew this was a skill I’d need in the future. Every time I arrived at the galvanized mesh, I gripped my little fingers around it and pushed off for another round, not unlike the kick-turns that swimmers use so as not to lose momentum.

I could have run around pretending I was in Little House on the Prairie in my mother’s yard, which was flat as a soccer field, lined with forsythia, and backed up to an ancient stone wall, but it wouldn’t have been the same without the salty air, the hill, and Mimi.

If it had been a different era, Mimi might’ve said something like “you go, girl,” but instead she just told me that she loved watching me have the time of my life. “I’m happy if you’re happy, babydoll,” Mimi said, “That’s all that matters.”

When I was done, Mimi smacked the loose grass off the bottom of my feet, but didn’t make me wash them. That wouldn’t have worked at my mother’s house, which was so clean it was sometimes hard to tell if anybody lived there. Mimi let me put my feet on the furniture—couch, coffee table, kitchen chairs—and she didn’t care about dirt, sand, crumbs, or anything. Mimi shook the sand out of my bedding if things had gotten gritty, and sprinkled talcum powder between the sheets to make them feel fresh and silky.

Once in bed, I’d tuck into a fetal position and pull my grass-stained feet up close to my face so I could smell the earth on my body and in my dreams I would ponder all the chances I’d someday take.