When I look back, it seems to have been a case of love at first sight. I met my future father-in-law, his wife and their beach house all on the same day. His wife had been coming to the same stretch of beach since early in her girlhood and, for her and her daughter, whom I was shortly to marry, it was more heavily and richly layered with memories, associations and stories than any place my own family had lived since we had left Europe 70 years before.