Sabbatical

After some fits and starts this month, winter has finally arrived in earnest in Highlands, here in mid-November with all the trees finally stripped of their leaves.  Although it has been cold off and on this month, yesterday was the first day when I felt the cold.  I arrived at Founders Park after finishing some errands, hoping that it would warm up a bit, but the wind was blowing hard.  The older I get the more I feel the cold and the wind, and I marvel sometimes at how easy it used to seem to run when the temperatures plummeted into the teens and single digits.  I still remember vividly those days, when I would feel snow and wind stinging my face so hard that I would sometimes run backwards for a few steps, just to get a little break.

By the time I reached the top of Chestnut Street hill, it had not relented much, so I did something I have not done for awhile and decided to climb Big Bearpen Mountain, my old adversary, that unrelenting ascent of some 800 feet in elevation.  I warmed up pretty quickly, as I had hoped, and as always it was worth the climb, the lakes of South Carolina shining on the horizon, Whiteside standing out clear and sharp on this cloudless day.  I saw no sign of that bear that beds down behind my friend Fred's house there on the summit.  Perhaps he has finally hibernated, although only a few days ago it was warm enough that somebody posted a picture of a snake crossing a road in our vicinity.

This morning, the wind had increased, and when I went out on the deck for my Tai Chi, I ducked around the corner to avoid some of its impact.  I checked the conditions up in Town on my iPhone when I came inside, and then I pulled up Atlantic Beach, NC, something I have been doing from time to time over the past few days.

I wrote "The Ocean is Calling" on our little kitchen blackboard this weekend, and we have been making preparations for what will be our sixth year staying at the condo on the beach owned by Martha's aunt Lizette.  It is through her generosity that we are able to stay there during the coldest part of the winter, where we can enjoy being outdoors running and hiking in a part of the Outer Banks that we have come to love.  This will be the earliest that we have left Highlands.  Because of Covid-19, we will drive straight there, not even stopping for an overnight stay in Winston-Salem as we usually do or having time to visit Lizette.  Readers of this blog will know that Martha's mama, Jane Lewis, passed away in June, and so Thanksgiving will be a sad time.  We are looking forward to a quiet Thanksgiving, just the two of us.

We call this time during the winter a Sabbatical, and that's exactly what it is:  a time to read, to write, to reflect on the year just past and the one lying just ahead, filled now with some hope because of the two different vaccines that have been developed and could be available as early as Spring - always assuming that the President-Elect will be permitted to take charge with competent people around him and good science guiding our future.  The current occupant of the White House - I have come to avoid using his name entirely - seems more interested in stirring up discord and playing golf than in bringing this pandemic to an end.

But that's something we hope to work on during this Sabbatical, too.  We hope we can put some of the stress of the past four years behind us and look forward to a new year, filled with possibilities, with hope, with a return to some kind of normalcy.  And we are looking forward to those long, long days, when we can bury ourselves in a book all day, or work on a poem, or go for a hike or a run to Fort Macon, our only appointments the sun and the tides.

Yes, the ocean is calling.  And we must go.