Return to Highlands

We left Duck on Sunday morning and it was a beautiful day for traveling - clear blue skies and little traffic on the road until we arrived in the Raleigh metro area when it suddenly became plentiful and fast.  What were all these people doing on the road on a Sunday afternoon?  I could not fight traffic like this every day.  We finally arrived at our go-to place in Winston-Salem these days, the Historic Brookstown Inn, and it was a relief to stretch cramped legs.  Monday morning was another gorgeous day; there was less and less traffic as we approached Highlands, and then in Brevard we got onto familiar two-lane roads again.  What a beautiful Town we live in!  It is always such a joy to drive down Main Street after an absence of some time.

We had taken a photo of our walkway when we left Highlands on April 7, and I took another when we returned today, Monday, April 30.  What a transformation in a little over three weeks!

The grass needed mowing, of course, and there were a few branches that had fallen.  The main damage was a broken window to the kitchen door, cracked into a hundred jigsaw-puzzle-like pieces, but still intact (until I tried to remove the door from its hinges two days later and it crumbled so suddenly and completely that the tarp I had spread out proved useless - we were still picking up glass a week later).  We think this happened from the impact of that big tree on our neighbor's property which we finally arranged to have taken down; she took a movie of the operation on her phone and texted it to me, it looked as if the might have been enough to break glass.

Fortunately, everything else seemed to be intact.  The full Pink Moon had materialized the night before, and it still shone brightly in our windows when we went to bed.  And it was so quiet, as it always is here in our neighborhood.  We had grown accustomed to the constant rhythmic crashing of the surf every night; now there were only a few crickets whispering in the moonlight.

It is good to be back home again.