I was told I was conceived on a beach. Six years later I watched my parents walk along the East Hampton shore on one of the last days of their marriage. Down by the water's edge my mother stooped and sifted through shells and rocks for sea-washed glass. Some distance away my father lumbered up the heavy banks of the dunes, carrying his shoes in his hands.

The surf fizzed like Champagne. Sand blew into my hair, then into my face, stinging my eyes, momentarily blinding me. I blinked. When I looked again, my father was gone. My mother stood, as slender as an egret, staring out to sea.

Had sand not blown into in my eyes, inserting that half-second pause, it would be a different memory, a much less poignant image.

Nearly all of us have an experience of sand. Sifting and molding and burying our bodies in its soft embrace. Building castles, digging holes, watching with glee or alarm as wind and sea demolish our creations. We draw pictures in it, write messages - declarations of love, the word HELP - or just stand in quiet contemplation as the waves roll over our toes.

When I was in my twenties and an insomniac living in the landlocked Midwest, I lay in bed at night and tried to get to sleep by imagining myself slowly writing the word SLEEP in the sand. I saw myself in a long white dress, on an even whiter expanse of beach, stick in hand, carefully carving each letter. By the time I got to the last curl of the P, I hoped I'd be dreaming. Sometimes it even worked.

In my community, beach-going is one of the activities we engage in, like churchgoing and ball games, to form shared memories - from whale sightings to sand-castle competitions, weddings to memorials.

I remember in 1996 when TWA flight 800 went down near East Moriches, it seemed as if my entire village of Southampton flocked down to the beach and stood staring out at the ocean in disbelief and dread. Strips of beach were quarantined off with tape. Everything we picked up we thought of as evidence. What, we wondered, would be washed up on our shores?

A few years later when we heard that a finback whale had done just that, the village turned out again to witness the event. A friend and I grabbed our sons from the school playground and trooped down to see this magnificent creature.

As we walked to the site, we passed cars stranded in the sand. People not wanting to make the trek on foot had tried to drive the distance, but instead got stuck as the tide came in. (It's funny how sand may irritate and sting our eyes, trap our cars and stick to our skin, but is also so soft that it invites us to walk barefoot across its surface.) Finally we came upon this beast, like a dinosaur lying on his side, one eye popping out, his skin marbleized and eaten away in patches by salt.

I felt as if I were on a film set, my village gathered around a monster that had emerged from the sea. People posed for pictures in front of the huge, gaping mouth.

For most of my life I've been going to beaches on the eastern tip of Long Island. I visit them even in my dreams. Sand is the thread connecting me to this place and to the events, these little pearls of my life, which have transpired here. Perhaps nothing gives me greater satisfaction than to sit and sift, walk and wonder, on this soft fraying edge of land where earth and sea meet.

It is not surprising, then, that at the end of my own marriage, I went back to that East Hampton beach where my parents had walked in the final days of their marriage. I was alone.

I stooped and scooped and held a fist-full of sand in my hands and then let it run gently through my fingers and thought, not of their sad walk on the beach, but of the changes occurring in my own life.

How fitting that I should have been conceived on a beach. Looking out to sea I said to myself, this is where life came from.