Big Mill to Duck

When we awoke at the Big Mill after a night of sound sleep - there is little traffic on Big Mill Road - fog had settled in again.  I went outside and walked around the yard a little to find a good place for my morning Tai Chi, finally settling on the driveway next to the pond.

The two cats who had kept their patrol the previous evening were nowhere to be seen (no doubt settled at the foot of Chloe's bed), but I disturbed the purple martins nesting in great numbers next to the pond.  They flew in huge circles above me, making eerie buzzing sounds that fell outside the usual spectrum of chirps and warbles.

Breakfast is always a treat at the Big Mill.  The jams and preserves are made by Chloe from fruit grown at the farm, and all of the other menu items are locally-sourced.  We had the feeling that she knew the name of the pig who wound up in the sausage-cheese-grits quiche.

We stopped for lunch - Reuben sandwiches at the Weeping Radish Eco Farm, one of our usual stops - and then wandered through the rambling rooms of the Cotton Gin in Jarvisburg, in the same location since 1929.

We always manage to find something or other to buy there, and Martha found some nice items while I watched the newest addition to the operation, the hang gliding taking place in the big flat fields out back.

I watched as an ultra-light plane took off, towing a hang-glider behind.  It rose higher and higher in the sky until it was barely visible to the naked eye.

Then the plane circled and landed in the field, leaving the hang-glider aloft, circling like a hawk on the thermals, like the ones we often see over our little valley in Clear Creek.  Lower and lower it descended.

And finally it came to rest on the same grass runway from which it had been towed aloft.  I can only imaging what a ride it must have been!  A man was standing out in the parking lot watching, too, and he asked, "Is that someone you know?"  "No," I replied, "Just watching.  It's not on my bucket list, but who knows?"

Soon we were crossing the Wright Memorial Bridge from Point Harbor to Kitty Hawk, familiar to us in many ways.  We once went kayaking at the Kitty Hawk Kayak School.  And the starting line to the Flying Pirate Half Marathon is here, too, just a little ways down The Woods Road.

A brief stop at Harris Teeter to stock up on the essentials, and then we were checking in at Twiddy in Duck.  The folks there are professionally friendly, instantly making you feel at home.  "Have you stayed here before?" a smiling young woman asked us.  "Oh yes, many times!"  We have actually stayed in this same little house for ten years.  It must be the smallest house in this part of the Outer Banks, snuggling low between the sand dunes, the ocean just visible outside the quaint, screened-in porch, where I have often enjoyed watching the rain fall.

I wrote a poem here in 2012, which was a finalist in the James Applewhite Poetry Competition and published in the N. C. Literary Review in 2014.

"Rainy day at the beach and nothing to do,

Il dolce far niente.  Rain streaks the porch screen,

Leaving little strands of dangling pearls."