For one week every summer we vacation in a seaside town. It's always the same seaside town, the same week of the summer: after the weather has gotten hot, but before the real crowds arrive. We know exactly what to expect from our trip. We travel the same roads in the same car packed with the same towers of stuffed animals and the same large selection of sodium-enhanced snack foods. We stay in the same hotel, pester the same sales clerks, see the same sights on the same scenic byways and walking paths. We eat at the same restaurants, where we order the same dishes every night. And every evening, after dinner, we choose the same flavors of ice cream and lick our cones thoughtfully while we brave the breezes at the same harborside park.

It should get tedious, all this sameness. But it never does: we think this seaside town is the finest place in the world, and our habits perfectly adapted towards wringing every last bit of enjoyment out of it. We are not bored but delighted by the way we circle back to this same spot every year, running into our own memories at every turn. I suspect that this is the place where my children both became conscious of the possibility of memory. "Did we eat at this restaurant when I was a baby?" Sam asks. An affirmative answer brings a huge smile to his face. He tries to picture himself as a drooling infant, babbling, being hushed, banging a spoon on the table. Later, as we walk along the pier, he looks over at his younger sister, whose mouth has fallen open in astonishment at the sheer size of a cruise ship in the harbor. He asks, "Did we always come look at the boats here when I was her age?" We tell him about how, at three, he fell in love with the ferry boat, and we'd plan our days around its schedule so that he could watch it come in and out of port. He smiles again, absorbed in the task of learning his own history by heart.

But it's not just his own history that he's learning here. T-shirt and trinket stores march up the hill from the harbor. We may have come to this park for the harbor views, but all my kids see are the vistas formed by display windows and shop doors, behind which lie endless piles of plush and plastic treasures. Sam tugs us up the hill and leads us into his favorite store, where he has fallen in love with two of the softest, floppiest, priciest stuffed animals. When we balk, he looks at me soulfully, thick black lashes framing his dark eyes: "Mama, did you used to come into this store when you were a kid?"

It is his trump card. He knows that I have been coming here since I was a baby myself. I have begged my own parents for stuffed animals from rotating racks, for trinkets that mark another moment passed through this lovely floating world. Now, I wander these same streets with my own children, watching them stop to examine every plastic sailboat, rubber lobster, and stuffed purple moose along the way. Just like I used to do.

Had I forgotten how it felt to be five years old and seized with an almost unbearable longing for little bits of plastic crap and bundles of anthropomorphic fake fur? There, just next to the stuffed animals Sam so covets, stands a spinner rack full of puppets. I spot a black bear puppet just like the one that I once cried over, when I was a child. It was in a store on the road from the harbor. I was eight or nine; we were on our way to get ice cream when I saw it. The bear was too expensive, my parents said. But we went into the store every night for a week, and every night I would stand longingly in front of the bear, with tears glistening on my lashes. My parents finally gave in. I still have the bear puppet, though it's tucked in now at the bottom of a basket with the crush of my children's toys. Yes, I remember. Sam goes back to the hotel that night with both his desired stuffed animals. It's a small price to pay for restoring to me the memory of my bear puppet, and the moony little girl I once was.

That's why we come back. Revisiting this same place year after year, we learn to walk in step with the selves we were on each previous visit, in each previous year. I have been here myself as an infant, as an eight year old, as an angst-filled adolescent churning with loneliness. Coming here with my husband and children, seeing the shadows of past miseries on the streets and paths, I am suddenly breathless with my own current happiness. How can I not be, seeing my present in the light of my past? But it is through meeting myself in this same space every year that I am able to shape the progressions of my life into a coherent narrative, with recognizable patterns, touchstones, symbols – and happy endings. In such a context, everything seems a little sweeter. The ice cream cones of years past only intensify the flavor of the ones we hold dripping in our hands. Is there anything more pleasant than to observe the arc of one's own life, to meet oneself in the same place every year, over the same ice cream cone?

We think not. Though it is, perhaps, just possible that what we think we are doing – creating Proustian sense memories of our lives, built from ice cream and blue vistas and the smell of salt air – is only our way of keeping from ourselves the deepest, most uncomfortable truth. Not that the world and all we love is changing and passing away no matter how hard we work at cultivating sameness. That we know; it is no secret. What we don't want ourselves to know is this: we lack imagination and a sense of adventure. We think we are poetic, when in fact we are as stolid, dull, and unchanging as rocks. And not the colorful, polished rocks that are sold by the miniature velveteen bag at trinket stores around town, either. Boring grey rocks, like the handfuls of unremarkable gravel my daughter lobs at the ocean, one after another after another after another, for what seems like hours. I stand next to her, shifting my weight from one foot to the other and watching to make sure that she holds her fire when other people wander by. The waves beat against the shore, the sun beats upon the waves, the gravel pebbles beat upon the rocks below them with a faint clatter. It is all very, very dull. "Well," I say brightly to Miriam, "let's go do something now."

She looks up at me, her hand full of gravel poised in mid-throw, and raises her eyebrows. "I am doing somefing," she informs me. "I am frowing rocks."

My son nods in agreement, and scrambles down to reach the slightly larger stones closer to the shore. His face is screwed up, intensely concentrating, as he throws one stone after another into the waves breaking a few feet away. I have a sudden fragmented vision of my own grandfather, wearing a cap that hadn't been in style since the Great Depression, standing on this same shore, lobbing flat rocks into the waves with the same look of intense concentration. He could skip those rocks five or six times in the water, and we'd stand behind him, slightly awed. With each successful skip, he'd turn around to acknowledge our admiration.

He's been dead almost thirty years now. When Sam turns around to crow over a particularly satisfying splash of rock into sea, my own eyes fill with salt water. I shrug the tears away and reach for my own handful of rocks. I am doing something.

And we'll be back again next year.