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We’re more than halfway through nearly two weeks visiting the island where my wife and I grew up. We come here often, but this is our longest stay in years. I’ve found more time to slow down.

We stay in my wife’s childhood home, we drive my parents’ old car, in the morning we go to the beach where I spent my teenage years obsessively trying to become a professional surfer.

And now we have a daughter.

She is just old enough to be building a sense of place, or at least it feels like it to me. It’s a trip watching her explore the island that shaped us into the people and parents we’ve become.

And at the same time we have lived in the States nearly as long as we spent in the Caribbean, so I think we see everything through new eyes, with a completely altered perception of this place.

I always take pictures when we are here, but this time I told myself I would capture the story of the trip. The details in between the perfect sunsets.

These details are what make up a life.

While the Virgin Islands isn’t our “everyday” life anymore, it is very much an essential piece of our family. I make these pictures with the hope that our daughter will page through them one day and pick up little details like sea glass from a beach and add them to the mosaic of her identity.

I think that for her to truly know her parents, she has to know what this place feels like, because it is forever a part of us.

Do you have something like this in your life? If you do, find a way to document it. I believe these things matter.

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