I bought a painting from Catherine Christiano, a local Lyme artist. The subject of the painting is a stretch of beach we used to call the “private beach.” An ironic tag as we were climbing over the Flat Rocks from our own very private, gated, Old Lyme Shores Beach. The “private beach” (i.e., Edge Lea) was a strip of largely empty shoreline, backed by marshland, on which a couple of old-fashioned New England cottages sat. One of those cottages is depicted in CC’s painting. It’s a quiet stretch of beach—a reminder of what the Connecticut shoreline was like 100 years ago, before gated beach associations, fences, barriers, jetties, guards, and a proliferation of ‘Keep Out’ signs dotted the shore.