There is something timeless – and therefore reassuring – in a Vineyard beach as the air warms again and invites return to the ocean's edge.

"I just loved sitting still," the narrator of Barbara Kingsolver's book, The Bean Tree, says at one point; and that's the way it is at the beach. With the swirl of the water around you, sitting still at the beach is a powerful restorative; one leaves regretfully, but renewed.