An Easy Rhythm

It seems as if all I write about in this blog is the sunrise, but watching this ordinary daily occurrence sets the tone for the rest of the day – Emily Dickinson would say, “It’s all a common glory.” 

I noticed that someone had left a pair of shoes – a child’s shoes, by the size of them – next to the walkway, and I wonder how long they will stay there.  Martha takes her shoes off sometimes on warm days and parks them in that same place, blurry dimples of soft sand behind her where she has walked, and then closer to the water the clean outlines of her bare feet, heel and toes.  Her soles are tougher than mine; I always find myself thrown into a limp by crunching on a sharp shell, so I wear my running shoes or my hiking boots.  But I have decided I will let someone else remove these little shoes, perhaps not missed until the owner was halfway to wherever they came from.

We have fallen into an easy rhythm of sunrise and sunset and low tide and high, and it has been warm enough for three days in a row to eat lunch out on the balcony – shrimp burgers two days in a row, and tuna quesadillas today, and cold beer.  Our own little bistro table with the best view.

We do eat well, finding exactly what we need in the three grocery stores out here, especially Lowes Foods, which seems to have the freshest fruits and vegetables.  And in addition to Blue Ocean seafood, there is take-out from Friendly Market, a place on which we have relied for good, healthy food for several years now.

Owners Matt and Mindy Fitzpatrick started the market on a vacant lot on the corner of Bridges Street and Friendly Street (thus its name) and turned it into a 6000 square foot building with healthy food packaged to go, local produce when in season, and a good selection of beer and wine.  They opened a nursery a few years ago, and last year even sold Christmas trees.  Their pasta salad and cheese-and-tomato dip are staples, and this year they have begun to offer “Lighten Up 22” dinners to go.  So Chicken Bruschetta was dinner last night and will be again tonight (their dinners for two are so bountiful they turn into dinners for four).

In three days time, I have gotten caught up with my New Yorkers, and will begin on a book tonight.  Martha is reading Orhan Pamuk’s Snow, and I may start Anthony Doerr’s Four Seasons in Rome.  Martha reads more books than I do during the course of a year, and interesting ones, but I stay occupied with the New Yorker much of the time.  Out here, though, I read more in two months time than in ten months time in Highlands.  Perhaps I need to rearrange my free time in Highlands.

I brought my keyboard with me, too, not as good as a piano, but good enough to allow me to practice my handful of pieces of music and perhaps learn another.  

Good food, good books, good companionship, and a piano – what more could a person want on a Sabbatical?

Wasting Time

I am always surprised at how quickly the weather changes out here, from day to day, from hour to hour.  This morning the temperature was 64 degrees, and the north wind had turned around overnight and was coming from the south.  The sunrise was again partially blocked by clouds but gorgeous just the same.

It was so warm and mild that after breakfast I returned to the dune-top deck and sat watching the clouds on the southern horizon, which were changing from minute to minute.  You can see the weather coming from a long way off out here, especially when it is approaching from over the ocean.  I could see dark vertical bands of rain under a turbulent line of clouds, black drapes dangling down onto the water below, and a bright blue window suddenly opening above, as if a sash had been pushed up.

Out there in the morning sky a long line of birds was flying from east to west in front of the pinks and purples in the sky.

I didn’t need Peterson’s Field Guide to Birds to tell me that these were eastern brown pelicans (Pelecanus occidentalis), looking for breakfast in the ocean below.  They were all flying in the same direction, and I wondered how they returned to the east.  You could see their characteristic bills when some of them turned inland and flew overhead.

How glorious, to sit and listen to the ocean, to watch the clouds coming in, and to watch these pelicans floating by, sometimes soaring on unmoving wings.

I realized after a time that I had spent an hour out on the dune-top deck, simply watching and listening.  What a glorious waste of time.  Beach time.  It reminded me of Mary Oliver’s poem, The Summer Day, except that I was here surrounded by sand dunes instead of grassy fields.

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Be Young, Be Foolish

It was still windy when I awoke on Tuesday morning, our first full day here in Atlantic Beach, 15 minutes before sunrise.  We don’t set alarms out here (unless there is a race the next morning) or spend much time looking at clocks – “Living on Beach Time,” as T-shirts and cocktail napkins like to advertise in local shops.  No matter how thick the shades are, first light seems to creep past them, and if you sleep until sunrise it is banging loudly at the windows.

I went out the walkway in 20 mph wind, temperature in the upper 30s, for my first morning Tai Chi on the dune-top deck.  The walkway to the deck is much longer than you would expect before it leads ultimately to the sandy path between the dunes and the wide, wide beach, wider here than in any other oceanfront place we have stayed.  We have measured the distance and it must be a quarter mile from the building to the ocean.

In Highlands, I practice my morning Tai Chi most mornings on our deck, where conditions are always changing.  A week or two ago, I startled three deer browsing on the still-green grass between the apple trees.  But here before the ocean it is always special, the heavily-vegetated dunes on each side, the sound of the crashing surf ahead of me.  The beach is south-facing, one of the few places where you can watch sunrise and sunset from the same vantage point.  There was a deep purple layer of clouds on the horizon and the sun was somewhere behind that curtain in golden sunrise glory.

Straight ahead to the south, patches of clouds were picking up the rosy glow of sunrise, and all around the horizon, even to the west and north, the sky was tinged with the same color, as if the light was a sound reverberating all around.

My witty friend Morris wrote to me this weekend to tell me about his New Year’s Resolutions as a runner.  “This year seems like a good one so far.  After I run today I will have a string of running every day this year.  By the way, my New Year's resolution is to live forever.  So far I have kept that resolution.”  It occurred to me that I should resolve to watch sunrise over the ocean every morning.  So far I had a string of sunrises every day!

Martha had posted the first entry for “On the Blackboard” of the new year, and I thought it was especially appropriate for our Sabbatical time here.

We had done some provisioning yesterday on the way to the condo, but we needed to do some more today, and our first stop was Blue Ocean Market just over the causeway in Morehead City.  I love seeing the fresh fish lined up neatly on ice and to see on the board what is coming in today.  We will buy our shrimp, scallops, crab cake, and fresh fish here, but today we were looking for shrimp salad and cole slaw (for shrimp burgers).  Chef Jeremiah also posts instructional videos on his website showing how to prepare everything from Caribbean Mahi Mahi to soft shell crabs.

The wind had died down by afternoon and it was low tide, so we took our first walk down to the Oceanana Pier and back, about a mile to the west.  There is always something new to see on the beach – what the tide has washed in overnight, what shore birds are out and about or winging overhead – and we have never taken this walk, in any weather conditions, and not returned feeling renewed and refreshed in body, mind, and spirit.  We noticed immediately that some new benches had been installed just below the dunes, and there was a plaque on the one just outside our condo remembering Matt Cobb, who had died last year.  I noted that he was born the same year as I.

That verse rang a bell – “Be young, be foolish, but be happy!”  I have to believe that you can be young (and foolish, and happy) at the age of 72!  I vaguely remembered the Tams from the Sixties, and a visit to YouTube found a video of them performing their hit song of 1968, performing a dance routine reminiscent of the Temptations and so many other African-American musical groups of the era, and each of them seemed to be wearing . . . a tam?  Matt must have been a fan.

We began to spot some interesting shells!

 

Martha pointed out the shell holding a handful of sudsy water in the palm of its hand.  The sea star was especially nice – not as beautiful as the royal sea star we found last year,  but still relatively uncommon.  The horseshoe crab was covered with tiny barnacles of some kind.  And what was that curvy line of feathers doing stuck in the sand? – perhaps a child had gathered them and made a whimsical creation.

Two young women were doing the same thing as we, and had filled a plastic bucket to overfilling.  And what a treasure they had found, topped with four beautiful royal sea stars!  They said they had stumbled on them by accident, higher up on the beach.  There is a saying that you don’t find sea glass, it finds you, so perhaps the same rule applies to sea stars.

We returned with hearty appetites, and after awhile I plated up our appetizers – that delicious shrimp salad from Blue Ocean, and glasses of cold Sauvignon Blanc.  Martha spread our own humble collection of shells out for display – not bad for our first walk on the beach! – and we settled in to books and magazines and puzzles.

What a precious privilege it is to be alive!

Chinese Lanterns

We left Highlands on an unseasonably warm Sunday morning.  It had been so warm that some of our crocuses were beginning to appear a day after the New Year had begun, and later in the day we saw daffodils blooming in Brevard and Asheville.

It had rained during the night but it stopped for the most part, and it was a good day for travel, overcast skies and little traffic.  We usually break up the nearly-500-mile journey to Atlantic Beach into two days, and this year we decided to stay one night in Cary, NC.  Martha had wanted to see the Chinese Lantern Festival there for several years and somehow it had never worked out, but this year it fitted perfectly in our plans, and she even found a motel only two miles away from Koka Booth Amphitheater.

I liked the idea of lantern festivals, held all over Asia, which Britannica explains may have originated as far back as the Han Dynasty (206 BCE to 220 CE).  Buddhist monks would light lanterns on the 15^th day of the lunar year in honor of the Buddha, but later the festival extended to honoring all deceased ancestors.  “The Lantern Festival aims to promote reconciliation, peace, and forgiveness.”

The weather forecast had been calling for rain all day, and I kept checking the radar app on my phone, just as I would had we been running a race.  We have run marathons and half marathons in the rain, and would not have been dissuaded from the Festival merely because of the weather.  But I was also concerned about being in a crowded venue with the Omicron Variant on the loose.  We checked in at our motel, then ate an early dinner at the nearby MacGregor Draft House and easily drove the two miles to the Festival under darkening skies but still not a drop of rain.

We were among the first to arrive for the evening, and the venue was not crowded at all.  We immediately found ourselves in a long corridor filled with paper lanterns, overhead and along both sides, and absolutely beautiful!  We wandered the pathways looking at the other displays, some of them animated, all of them works of art.

Many of the displays were animated, and I managed to capture some of them in videos, huge peacocks opening their tails, creatures from under the sea swimming in the warm Cary air, lotus blossoms opening and closing.  It was all very lovely.

 

 

After we had made our way through all of the displays, we gathered with many other festival-goers at the stage to watch a performance by Chinese acrobats and performers.  There were quick-change artists, a young woman spinning hula hoops, a traditional fan display, and finally a woman on a unicycle tossing bowls onto her head.  We were uncomfortable with the crowd in front of the stage, and although our socially-distanced vantage point was a good one, alas, all of my photos of these dazzling performances turned out to be too distant and  blurry to post. 

We made our way back to the motel then in light rain, but it was not until an hour or two later that we heard the storm arrive in full force, rain blowing horizontally against the windows and thunder sounding during the night – in January!  It was an all-too-real reminder that we are living in a time of unprecedented global climate change.  In the morning the rain was still coming down, and we learned that there was flooding throughout the area.  Reporters from the Raleigh television station were on-screen in the motel breakfast room standing in front of overflowing creeks and flooded fields.  And traffic along I-40-East – our route this morning – had slowed to a crawl due to flooded lanes and traffic accidents.  We checked the internet, and saw that Highlands had received snow, treacherous roads, and power outages overnight.  We had escaped just in time!  A photo posted by The Highlander Newspaper showed Fifth Street, the very street where I had run on Saturday morning, temperatures in the upper 50s.  What a drastic change!

There was some precipitation halfway between rain and sleet coming down when we left the motel, and at the bottom of the hill, across from MacGregor’s, a river was nearly out of its banks and the woods were flooded.  We made our way cautiously to I-40 in light rain, noticing several cars stopped on the shoulder of the road.  One of them was facing backwards, as if they had skidded a few times and landed there.  But neither the conditions nor the grounded cars slowed down many vehicles that rocketed past us at 70 or 80 miles per hour, weaving between us slower and more cautious drivers.

At last we exited the interstate and made our way, in lessening rain, through Goldsboro, Kinston, and New Bern toward Morehead City, finally arriving at the oceanfront place in Atlantic Beach where we were staying.  The rain had stopped but the wind was picking up, 25 or 30 mph, but I went out onto the familiar dune-top deck after we had unpacked the car to see the great wide Atlantic Ocean, waves breaking and rising into the air and dissolving in the wind, and a wind so sharp that it cut like a knife.  It was good to be here again, I thought, good to be experiencing the wild ocean and the leaping waves, and to hear the wind whistling through the door before we went to bed and shaking the steel balcony rails all night long.  Good to have arrived safely.

An End and a Beginning

The end of one year and the beginning of another is always cause for reflection.  We look back at what we accomplished in 2021, and we look forward to what we intend to do with the opportunity of 2022.  Christmas has come and gone, and in only a couple of days we have taken down the tree and all of the decorations.  What is left behind is the warm memories of the holidays – visits with Martha’s two aunts Anne and Mary, with our daughter and her husband, with friends and neighbors.  That means more to us than any gifts we might wrap up and place under the tree.

For 40 or 50 years, I have received or given myself a copy of The Old Farmer’s Almanac, a quirky little publication containing detailed but dubious weather forecasts for each part of the country, some good gardening and nutritional advice, weird but interesting articles such as “The Art and Science of Animal Tracking,” and back pages containing outrageous and thoroughly enjoyable advertisements for everything from Spiritual Oils and Lucky Eye bracelets to “Powerful Soaps.”  But I think the thing I like the most is the dense, detailed descriptions of the motion of the moon and the stars and the planets, of Ember Days and Halcyon Days and moveable feasts.  They remind me how small we are after all on this little blue planet beneath the great revolving constellations.  With little ceremony, I will consign the 2021 edition to a dusty bookshelf somewhere and open the first page of 2022.

Another tradition we have kept for many years now is to print out the things we took turns writing on the little blackboard in our kitchen throughout the year.  It is a record of holidays celebrated, funerals attended, hopes and dreams and promises made and kept.  The first thing Martha wrote in 2021 was in Atlantic Beach:  “More long walks, more books, more music, more dancing, more sunsets, more hugs, more road trips, more laughter, more fun, more love, more memories, more beach.”  We sought and found most of those things last year.  As I scan down the page I see Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, birthdays, Valentine’s Day, Anniversary.  “Workers in the driveway,” we wrote when our new addition and carport were under construction and we were greeted by the sound of construction early every morning.  Right before that is “Bells in the Night,” the book that I published this summer.  “Take every chance you get in life,” Martha wrote just after that, “Because some things only happen once.”

Now I have written the last thing on the blackboard to mark the end of a long, tumultuous year, a year that began with a violent insurrection and a deadly pandemic, but pivoted into new and competent leadership in Washington, the return of some justice and truth to the political arena, the hope of a vaccine and new treatments.  We are looking forward to a New Beginning.  It is time for our annual Sabbatical.

It was John Muir who famously wrote, “The mountains are calling and I must go.”  But now we are looking forward to the opposite, to returning to Atlantic Beach for another Sabbatical, a time for reading and reflection, for writing more poetry, for drawing closer together and struggling to find peace during a time of turbulence and change.  And for hiking and running.  This year, we managed to complete eight races since September after an 18-month hiatus due to Covid, and we are looking forward to continuing to race with two already on the calendar.  Because although it has been unusually warm for the past two or three weeks – breaking an all-time record in Asheville just after Christmas by four degrees, and here in Highlands yesterday a balmy 60 degrees in the morning – the weather will soon change, and the older I am the more I seem to feel the cold.  The Asheville weather report predicts an abrupt arrival of winter on Monday which it is calling a “Weather Whiplash.”  While we don’t expect it to be 70 degrees in Atlantic Beach very often, neither will it often be 23 degrees, and we hope we can avoid that icy blue face with icicles.

Yes, we are looking forward to the wide Atlantic Ocean, the moon and the stars, the sunrise and the sunset, and the unending rhythm of the surf.

Tell me . . . have you walked out today,
Out the short walkway to the top of the dunes,
Where the sea oats are quivering in the breeze,
And children are running heedless with joy into
The abundant surf, the gracious wide-open ocean?

Trotting for Spot

I have participated in some small races over the years, but today’s Trot for Spot 5-K was a new record.  Martha had signed up two weeks ago, but I was unsure whether I was ready for another race – this would be the third in less than a month.  The race benefited Evelyn's Place Rescue, a no-kill shelter for canines.  “I’ll bet there’s a dog on the shirt,” I told Martha, and there was indeed (although, surprisingly, there were no dogs in the race).  

It was a beautiful, warm day, temperatures in the mid-50s only six days before Christmas.  We arrived at Pitts Park in Clarkesville, where a dozen or so people were gathered near a FINISH banner.  I do enjoy these small races, perhaps even more than large crowded events, but as we warmed up and the time approached for the race to start, there still were not many runners at the park at all.  We lined up on a sidewalk and I counted heads; there were twenty-one of us trotting for Spot today.  These small races are informal affairs; the race director walked over and described the course to us, and then just like that we were off, crossing a bridge over the Soquee River, and then out Beaver Dam Road into some pretty countryside with rolling fields and cows.  The road climbed higher and higher up a long hill, then after an intersection down another hill to a traffic-cone turn-around. 

The Race Director was at that intersection and I called out, “I’ll bet that turn-around is at the bottom of the hill, isn’t it?”  And it was.  I had noticed that he seemed to be picking up rocks from the side of the road; Martha told me after the race that she guessed he was counting out rocks into a pile to be sure all twenty-one runners passed him.  The long hill that we had climbed was an advantage now as we headed back to the finish.  I heard footsteps behind me and a man passed on my right.  “Oh good, I’ll follow you to the finish!” I said.  “Those directions seemed a little sketchy at the end.”  He laughed and said, “I don’t know the way either!”  The blind leading the blind.  He stopped to walk and I passed him, and he did not pass me again, and in no time we had turned, crossed the bridge, and then down a short and very steep hill to the finish line, so steep that I walked for the first time in the race.

Martha had done well, taking First Place Master’s Woman and receiving a very nice trophy, the old-fashioned kind we used to always get in races, a shiny gold woman on a little pedestal.  I took first place in (I think) the 70-74 age group and was happy with my time of 36:53, almost as fast as my time in the Reindeer Run two weeks ago. 

It was another good day, as it always is when we compete in a race, no matter the size.  The largest race I have ever completed was the Boston Marathon ten years ago, where I was lost in an ocean of 50,000 runners, and today's was the smallest race.  Size really doesn’t matter.

 

 

P. S. - The day after I posted this - Monday, December 20 - Martha found our official times for the race on the internet and printed them out.  "Thirty-five: fifty-three!  That can't  be right. It was thirty-six: fifty-three!  They have these times all wrong," I insisted.  I checked the history on my GPS watch for Sunday and confirmed that it was . . . 35:53, one minute faster than I had thought - not "almost as fast as my time in the Reindeer Run two weeks ago," but nearly a minute faster.  I realized that I had not had my reading glasses on when I looked at my watch.  "Thank you!" I told Martha  "You just made my day!"  35:53 made this my fastest 5-K time since we resumed running in September after not having run races for 18 months.  To a runner, gaining an entire minute in a 5-K is significant progress.  So I must conclude that running a race every two weeks or so, as we have been doing at Martha's urging, has had a positive effect on my running, which is especially empowering for an aging runner who is accustomed to saying, "The older I get, the faster I was." 

When's the next race?

Gingerbread Houses

For the past two months, I have been limiting topics covered in this blog to running and races.  But it is mid-December, and now that Covid restrictions have been easing we have been attending some holiday events, such as the Van Gogh Alive exhibit at the Biltmore House over the Thanksgiving Holiday (see post of November 25).  Last Sunday we attended a show at the Highlands Playhouse called the Scott and Patti Holiday Spectacular and it proved as entertaining as it had been billed (“Join Scott & Patti as they celebrate the season through songs, dances, side splitting comedy, and a bevy of special guests.”)  The Sunday before that we attended the first performance from the North Georgia Players since before Covid, We’ll be Home for Christmas, four cute mini-plays, and it was equally entertaining.

This week, we attended the National Gingerbread House Competition at the Grove Park Inn in Asheville.  We have been to this competition in past years, and the Grove Park Inn is always a treat to visit under any circumstance.

Constructed in 1913 and listed on the National Register, the Inn was built by Edwin Wiley Grove and Fred Seely near Sunset Mountain overlooking Asheville.  It was constructed of rough-looking granite quarried from the mountains above the inn and transported by mule and wagon to the site.  William Jennings Bryan, Secretary of State at the time, was present when it opened and gave the keynote address, proclaiming the Grove Park “was built for the ages.”  I attended conferences a few times at the Inn when I worked for the Town years ago, and it was always a special treat to wander its long corridors and look at the old photographs showing its construction. 

The roof, for example, is five-and-a-half inches thick, a single pour of concrete to avoid seams – it was promoted as a completely fireproof structure at the time.  The granite is deliberately rough as intended by Seely, and I spotted this sign among the photographs which poetically described the intent of the builders.

In contrast to this massive structure, we marveled at the dozens of intricate miniature houses constructed not from granite and concrete but from gingerbread and candy.  Curious about the construction, I read on-line the rules and regulations for the competition: 

Everything above the base of your entry must be composed completely of edible materials. . . The main structure of your entry must be constructed of at least 75% gingerbread, some of which should be exposed.  Edible materials are not limited to candies and icings. Use of gum paste, fondant, pastillage, chocolate, modeling chocolate, royal icing, isomalt, cast sugar, gelatin and pressed sugar is encouraged. Use of "Disco Dust," "Rainbow Dust" or “Hologram Powder” is permitted.  Due to the danger of working with hot sugar, techniques using poured hot sugar or isomalt are reserved for the teen and adult categories only. This includes melted sugar candies.  Candies must be unwrapped and free of any non-edible materials, for example: lollipop sticks.

I wondered what "Disco Dust" might be - it sounded like a performing-enhancing drug.  And lollipop sticks!  I had not thought about it, but that would have been a structural element that would have come in handy; I noted that one or two of the non-adult houses were already starting to lose their roofs.  But lollipop sticks, though serving the same purpose as steel rebar in the Grove Park Inn, would have been cheating, and apart from the wild imagination and technical skill exhibited, it was a marvel to think about the construction and transport of these houses to the site of competition.  Unbelievable!

It was unseasonably warm in Asheville for December, and as we left the Grove Park Inn in mid-afternoon the temperature was sixty degrees, so pleasant that we were able to put the top down on our Mini Cooper.  We drove the relatively short distance to Candler, just west of Asheville, and had a nice visit with Martha’s aunt Mary, whom we had not seen since before Covid.  Mary will be 90 years old in a week or two and is doing quite well; it occurred to me that she is nearly as old as the Grove Park Inn, and like the venerable Inn is apparently constructed of equally sturdy material.  When she saw our little car, she said she would like to go for a ride in it some day.  “Why not right now?” Martha said, and so they did.