Ordinary Days

On a clear, cloudless morning, sunrise is a dramatic event at the beach, first a tiny golden speck of light appearing on the horizon like the beam from a lighthouse, then the rising arc slowly blooming into a perfect circle, higher and higher.  It would be accompanied by grand music, like Richard Strauss' Also Sprach Zarathustra memorialized in Stanley Kubrick's movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.  Today it was a quieter, more modest affair, heralded by an orchestra noodling at first light, as if waiting for the conductor to appear.  The concert would have begun with some quiet strings playing a lovely melody softly from the silence, the clouds glowing in baroque shapes.

I wonder when I will grow tired of writing about sunrises?  Probably not before readers of this blog will.  But I enjoy during these sabbaticals paying attention, living out here in a different kind of world than we usually inhabit, where there is always something to see in that big sky, that big ocean, even on ordinary days.  On Sunday I wrote in this blog:  "It's true:  I'm bored to death, and I am absolutely loving it."  That is not exactly true.  I am never bored out here.  I can sit for an hour on the dune-top deck listening to birds and watching the sky and be completely absorbed.  And being absorbed is the opposite of being bored.

We manage to stay active very well out here, walking and running much more than we could in cold Highlands during the depths of the winter.  I had become accustomed in past years to visiting the large and well-equipped gym at the Morehead City Recreation Park, but due to Covid-19 I did not think this would be a safe thing to do.  So last week I bought two 25-pound hand weights, and this morning I found that I could complete a perfectly adequate workout in addition to the usual pushups, squats, and planks with which I start each day.  Martha, too, manages very well with her set of exercise DVDs called "Fit in 10" with which she starts the day.  I have grown accustomed to the enthusiastic voice of Larysa in the background, the trainer featured in the DVDs, encouraging her recruits:  "The more you put into it, the more you'll get out of it!"  "Don't forget to breathe!" 

Before lunch, we took a walk on the beach.  It was low tide, and overnight the temperature had dropped into the 40s with a stiff 10-mph wind, so we had it mostly to ourselves except for one or two fishermen and some shell-gatherers.  There was no shortage of shells.

I always  wonder how sharp an eye a person would have to possess to find a piece of sea glass, or a lost piece of jewelry, in that profusion of shells.

A little farther on, we came upon some shore birds, tiny sanderlings that I used to call sandpipers until corrected by Randy Newman on a bird hike.  Here was a true sandpiper, so large that he might have been a willet (Randy would have known, as well as its sex, age, and eating habits).

The fine sand makes a good  blackboard - a tabula rasa, a clean slate wiped clean by the tides every day - and we often find declarations of love and tender aspirations written in the sand with a shell instead of a piece of chalk, like this one.

We know nothing about Emily except that today is her birthday - the message was written only a few feet from the incoming tide - and that somebody loved her enough to write this.  In a little while, we came upon this, written in the same handwriting.

This inspired Martha to write down some words of her own.  It is hard not to be grateful in such a place and with Thanksgiving the day after tomorrow.

We wrote this one together.  The first time we ever rented a house in Duck 20 years ago, this was the name of the small house where we stayed.  It was a beautiful house and we stayed there one or two other times as well, owned and decorated by an artist who still has a gallery in Edenton.  Alas, Peace and Plenty was sold and replaced by some philistine of a developer with a tall, arrogant, ten-bedroom rental.  But we have retained the name and the concept and now we call our own home in Clear Creek Peace and Plenty.

We reached Oceanana Fishing Pier, about three-quarters of a mile away.  It was occupied today by only a handful of fishermen, perhaps because of the nippy breeze or poor fishing conditions at low tide.

All of that writing in the sand was erased by the tide before we returned.  But Martha found this almost perfect whelk bobbing in the surf and carried it back, together with the memories of a wonderful morning on the beach.

After lunch, we sat outside on the deck for just a little while, being careful not to absorb too much sunshine at first.  I had some spots burned off my head by my dermatologist just before we left Highlands and am well aware of the damage that too much sun can cause. 

Some workmen arrived at the house next to us and began unloading what looked like new kitchen cabinets from a truck.  Martha was reading and tuned them out, but I enjoyed listening to these men, laughing and wisecracking in loud voices that we could hear perfectly.  Whatever you do, I learned, do not install bamboo floors if you have a dog.  One of the men, perhaps both of them, owned a boat, as nearly every local seems to out here.  "What is it's draft?"  "Three-foot six."  They continued to talk amicably as they lugged heavy cabinets up the outside stairs to the deck in that easy way that men have as they work together in that camaraderie of common purpose.

How can a person be bored in this world we live in?  The sun never rises in exactly the same place on the horizon nor hurls its splendid light into the clouds in the same way.  There are always new and interesting fish in the sea and shore birds skipping in the surf.  The ocean is never exactly the same; today, despite the brisk breeze, it was remarkably calm, lapping at the shore like a big lake.  And books to read!  And contractors upon whom we can eavesdrop and capture and place into a blog that they will never read.  And somewhere out in the harbor, bobbing a little in the afternoon tide, a fishing boat lies at anchor, having a draft of exactly three-foot six.  On another ordinary day.