Each year our rented house was a far cry from the rentals of today. We could only afford rustic cottages with no A/C, no white carpet and no dishwasher. Furnished with hand-me-down furniture, the wood floors were unpolished and the walls paneled in real cypress (if only they could talk).

There was a cold-water shower stall downstairs where, after lolling for hours on the beach, we rinsed all the Johnson's Baby Oil from our sunburned bodies.

A full day on the beach meant that we came in at noon for pimento cheese sandwiches and sweet ice tea. After bolting down lunch, we returned for more sun and more searching for shells and shark's teeth.

I don't remember how old my son Skip was when we decided to hit the beach early each morning in order to get first crack at whatever had washed ashore during the night.

The decision was made right after we bumped into Mrs. Rhame, my former algebra teacher who was scouting for shells at low tide. She inquired about my life and family, and then asked Skip what he most liked to look for on the beach.

"Shark's teeth!" he said with no hesitation.

"Me too! Have you found any?"

"Last year I found five good ones, but this year only two."

She patted his head and laughed. "Well, come early every morning, keep your head down, and you'll find a lot more."

She glanced at me and said, "Hunting for shark's teeth means living in a world of looking down."

Oh, how right she was! We searched at daybreak after that (with our heads down) for petrified shark's teeth.

Every summer, my boy and I shared magical times before breakfast when the beach was bereft of people. We listened to the sounds of waves slapping softly at our bare feet, occasional squawks from hungry sea gulls, mournful ringing of far-off buoy bells.

If he happened to spot the black shiny tip of a shell buried in the sand, he would run ahead of me expecting to bring back the prized black petrified tooth. Always, we walked quietly, breathing the salty scent of seawater, the sacred smell to which a low country child learns early on to love.

But little boys don't stay that way for long. They grow up and frame a life for themselves outside of a mother's arms, as they should. My son did all that was expected of him including falling in love. And pretty soon a wedding was in the works.

I was living in California by then so my new husband and I flew back to South Carolina in anticipation of the event. Prior to the wedding, we rented a house on the Isle of Palms complete with roaches and smelly mattresses, overhead fans and cold-water showers. For two weeks, I allowed my unbridled love for the Carolina coast to feed my soul as it had not been fed since leaving the South.

Each day, I tramped back and forth from the beach to the house making mounds of pimento cheese sandwiches and gallons of sweet ice tea. At night, I slept soundly without waking, even with a ton of sand in my bed.

To cap off those idyllic days, my son would leave his law office in Charleston each evening, drive across the Cooper River Bridge and spend nights with us.

On the eve of his wedding, it was he who suggested that we get up at the crack of dawn and go once more to search for shark's teeth.

We awoke at five a.m. and as we high-stepped our way to the water through sea oats and sand spurs, we were very much aware that both our lives as we had known it, were about to change. He would always be the son I loved to pieces but he would no longer be my little boy.

From that day on, another woman would take my place. She would be the one to walk the beach with him and pick sand spurs out of his feet.

But on that particular July dawn, we strolled hand in hand down the solitary beach and welcomed the new day and his new life.

And we did not look down.