Rainy Day at the Beach

After a beautiful, balmy first day at Atlantic Beach yesterday, clouds began to roll in from the ocean just after dusk and the wind picked up.  The lights along the walkway from the beach became ghostly and dim in the gathering fog and the palm trees around the pool rattled.

During the night, we could hear the wind pick up even more, and then rain splattering against the windows.  The wind increased to a low growl, and from time to time it howled like a wild animal.

We do not mind rainy days and nights out here, though.  We are well-provisioned with books and magazines that we brought with us, and there is always something to do on the computer, like work on this blog.  For several months, I have been setting aside reading matter, including stories and longer articles in the New Yorker which I never seem to be able to read cover to cover since it arrives every week.  I began with a personal history piece by Haruki Murakami, one of my favorite authors, from October.  Then I finished this week's issue.  Later in the evening I dived into one of two books of poetry by Mary Oliver that Martha gave me for Christmas.

This morning I awoke to rain and fog out on the walkway.  I went downstairs and did my morning Tai Chi under the cover of the building.

A rainy day can be as pleasant as rain during the night.  This morning, Martha decided to attend a Yoga class that she had discovered last year and that we had both attended - the teacher remembered her, and the class was full - while I went to the hardware store and the post office, attending to a few more details, things we need to improve the condo that Lizette is nice enough to let us inhabit.  It was a good class, with all genders and types of bodies welcome, and I hope to join them myself in coming weeks (tall, clumsy old guys being welcome as well).

Now it is mid-afternoon, and Martha has gone to run a few errands herself, while I get caught up with my blog.  The rain - that kind of light, windblown rain that could be partly salt-water from the ocean - has nearly let up.  I am reminded of a poem I wrote a few years ago that appeared in the North Carolina Literary Review on a similar rainy day in Duck, where we were staying at the time.  Il dolce far niente is an Italian expression, and it means "the sweetness of doing nothing," or of just "puttering" as we might say in this country.

The Sweetness of Doing Nothing

Rainy day at the beach and nothing to do,
Il dolce far niente.  Rain streaks the porch screen,
Leaving little strands of dangling pearls.

The deck boards are wet and glistening dark,
And they make an indecent sound as I walk,
Slap-slap, step-step.  My bare feet.

Nothing to do.  But watch and listen;
So I go outside and stand in the rain,
Squinting up at the blinding gray dazzle

Where suddenly a long strand of pelicans flying
Appears overhead, as if released from stone,
Fragments falling away in shards of blindness,

Falling from south to deliberate north,
Huge and silent in the high tilting air:
Nine, twelve, gazing down at the water,

Following a meandering, narrow periphery
Between Pamlico Sound and wide open water,
Reading the eddies and the shadows below.

Their eyes are as big as the ocean,
As big as the horizon, sliding down crookedly
In the rapture of the sweet morning rain.

We have not seen any pelicans at Atlantic Beach yet but we expect there will be plenty.  Perhaps even another bird watching expedition, led by the sharp-eyed Ranger Randy, just down the road at Fort Macon.

The rain has stopped now, and light is starting to appear on the horizon, below the dark clouds to the west.  I decide to go for a walk, down to the pier, and I find that I have the beach entirely to myself.

The tide was high an hour ago, but the waves are more turbulent than usual and they surge onto the sand.  At one point I lost the game of tag and was glad I had decided to wear my Gore-tex hiking boots.

I did not find any shells to note, but what surprised me was that there were so many feathers on the beach.  They were everywhere, small and large, and in more than one place the big feathers were sticking in the sand, as if someone had picked them up and left a trail.  But there was nobody here but me. 

There is always something to see on the beach, and usually something to puzzle over, like this arrangement of seaweed and feathers in the shape, I thought, of a bird.

The sun will set in an hour, and already that narrow band of light on the horizon is wider and perhaps just a little purplish in color, anticipating another gorgeous sunset.

Tonight might be a good time to begin that British mystery I picked up yesterday at the Carteret Library in Beaufort.  And to listen to the sound of the ocean.