Rainy Day at the Beach

This was our first morning here in Duck, cloudy and cool with a strong onshore wind.  Martha was still nursing an injury, so I decided to run by myself, the first time I have been out in a solid week and after driving 550 miles.  I did not know what to expect as I strapped on my knee brace and headed out the door, but both the stiffness in my knee and the onshore wind diminished as I headed the half-mile down Marlin Drive to Highway 12, then turned south down through all of our familiar places in "downtown" Duck, finally turning east to run on the narrow sidewalk beside the tennis courts at the Four Seasons resort out to the ocean again.  It is exactly two miles, and a run that we enjoy while we are here.

On the return trip, I crossed Highway 12 and entered the Town Boardwalk, one of the nicest things about this place.  It meanders along the sound, sometimes going out pretty far from shore on boardwalks, sometimes returning so that you walk (or run) in front of businesses along the way.  At its heart is the Duck Town Park (town offices, restrooms, outdoor amphitheater for summer events), and along the way I passed Wave Pizza, right on the boardwalk, which we enjoy on warm days.  I am guessing that most of these businesses were happy to give up right-of-way in exchange for the foot traffic.  And despite the clouds and cool temperatures, I passed several friendly walkers on my way.

Another favorite stop is the Clinton Memorial Chapel, behind the Duck United Methodist Church; Martha's aunt Lizette visited here many years ago and first told us about it, back before the boardwalk was constructed.

There is always time to stop and give a prayer of thanks for being here, for my knee doing so much better, for all our blessings.  I never tire of reading the verses on the stained-glass window inside.

I ran all the way to the northern end of the Boardwalk, to the Waterfront Shops where we will be attending the Duck and Wine Festival on the last day of our stay, and then back to Ocean Watch again, a 4.5-mile run through this little tour of our favorite places.

After lunch the rain began, and we settled in with computers and books.  This is a good house to settle down in during a sea-side rain; unlike the ten- and twelve-story houses in other parts of the Outer Banks, it is a small, humble house, nestled in the dunes, and only a short walk to the ocean.  We can stand in the kitchen and see the waves, and lie in bed at night and hear them crash.

I wrote a little poem about a rainy day in this very house several years ago, which the N. C. Literary Review thought well enough to publish.  It begins like this (and those same strands of pearls hung on the screen):

"Rainy day at the beach and nothing to do,

Il dolce far niente.  Rain streaks the porch screen,

Leaving little strands of dangling pearls."

We went out late in the afternoon to pick up a new pair of running shoes that I had ordered and sent to Twiddy, and I had a nice conversation with the two ladies who were there.  "Do you run competitively?" one of them asked.  "Well, I used to," I admitted.  "Now I just do the best I can."  The next stop was Dockside 'N Duck, our favorite place to buy fresh seafood, less than a mile from our house.

We're old friends with these folks, too.  Lisa, one of the owners, used to live out our way 40 years ago when we lived in a little house in Barnardsville.  And their son-in-law's wife had been to a wedding not long ago at Old Edward Inn in Highlands.  We seem to constantly be running into people out here who have connections with the mountains.

Martha prepared a simple dinner of crabcakes with new potatoes and fresh asparagus we had bought yesterday from a little stand across from the Cotton Gin.

The rest of the evening was devoted to il dolce far niente, the sweetness of doing nothing:  reading books on the sofa, writing in this little blog that almost nobody reads, and listening to the ocean outside so close by.