Here, again...

We're home again, jiggidy-jig....

As I grow older, I become, more and more, a 'homebody'. I just spent a glorious week with one of my children and her fiancee and Bern and two of my best friends in the world on a beach that is wondrous and practically empty, with gulls and Pelicans and birds aplenty and with more good food than anyone deserves and reading 6 books. What could be better, I ask you?

Being home is the answer. Being with our cat and parakeet, who a neighbor child looked after while we were gone, and our dog who I rescued and liberated from the kennel this afternoon. Familiar things give me quiet joy. Home again, home again, juggidy-jig....

I love this house we've lived in since 1989, when Josh was 14 and Mimi was 11. Long gone now, the two of them, and Bern and I live on here. 23 years and counting, surrounded by animals late and quick and by our 'stuff', which has become like skin to me.

A mystical sojourn on Oak Island with some of the people we love most in the world. What could be better than that?

Well, maybe being home with Maggie singing and Luke rubbing against you and Bela home with us and the almost unbearable and also enchanting familiarity of 95 Cornwall Avenue.

I love being home, being 'here' again, after being 'there'.

I will sleep tonight the sleep of the dead and the innocent and wake in the morning to those so-familiar sights and sounds and smells and comfort of 'being Home'.

Being 'home' is about as good as it gets in my mind and heart and soul....

Beach Magic

Oak Island, NC Friday

Last day at the beach. We'll start home tomorrow before noon--Tim and Mimi to Raleigh to catch their flight to NYC; Bern, John, Sherry and I in the Land Rover going to x-143 off I 95 to spend the night just north of Fredricksburg, VA. Last day is quiet, people feverishly finishing books, trying to eat everything in the refrigerator, feeling wistful. I remember spending three weeks and a couple of times a month on this island. My dream would be two weeks next year. Maybe Jack, Sherry's husband will be retired by then and can come with us. Even if Tim and Mimi could only stay one week, it would be great. Maybe even Josh, Cathy and our granddaughters could come for part of the first week and Mimi and Tim for the second. That's what I'd like anyway, but the girls would have to come the first week so we'd have a week to rest up and recover!

This morning there was a moment of beach magic.

Tim and Mimi were out in the calm ocean (yesterday afternoon it was knocking people down but this morning it was like a big lake) when one of the ubiquitous pelicans came crash diving not 5 feet from them. When it bobbed to the surface it looked at Tim and Mimi and Tim and Mimi looked at it.

The huge bird came nearer and stopped, then Tim and Mimi moved toward the bird.

John and I were in the gazebo, watching.

The meet and greet went on for over five minutes until Mimi started to try to get on the ocean side of the bird and it flew away, flapping its wondrous wings.

You don't get close to pelicans, they being to noble to traffic with humans. But there for over 5 minutes, Mimi and Tim could have reached out and touched the bird (though they had better sense that to try that!) Tim was who called it 'beach magic'. Mimi just was amazed at how wierd pelicans are up close.

At one point John picked up one of the dozen or so devices we have with us that will take a picture.

Then he put it down.

"This will be much better in our memories than in a photograph," he said.

And he was right.

Still there

Today, the next to last day, things get fragmented. Tim took Mimi to Yoga and then they bought the 'big fish'--two red snappers. John drove his Land Rover around for an hour or so. Bern made the stuffing for the snappers. I read and read. Sherry's niece and grand-niece came to pick her up and she went to Southport with them for several hours. Tim and Mimi and Sherry got into the roughest surf we've had and Tim helped Sherry avoid drowning. Then we ate the big fish and now everyone but Bern and I am watching Family Guy in the living room while Bern watches the US Open Tennis in our bedroom and I type this.

The problem is this: a week is not enough. When Josh and Mimi were young we'd come to Oak Island for at least three weeks and several times for a month. That's enough time to get into Beach Time and stay on it, lost in linear time, often not knowing what day it is, or what week.

But just a week means by Thursday people are dreading going home--or longing too (like Bern and I longing to get home to our Puli)--so we start to fragment. Just protecting our identity and longing to keep the community together.

Tim and I had a late night conversation about 'belief' vs. 'practice', which I'll write a lot about when I get home and have the time and have my Puli dog with me....

One more day and then the drive home for Sherry, John, Bern and me. Tim and Mimi will fly our of Raleigh to NYC on Saturday. We'll all be home on Sunday, hopefully early enough to get Bela out of the kennel....

See you later.

being there

It's 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday. Tim is reading on a chair in the living room. Sherry was on the couch reading until just now when she went to check on the butter beans she grew in New Haven and brought to the beach for us to eat. We won't eat them tonight. John is cooking tonight, something involving ham and beans and yellow grits. Mimi and Bern are down in the Gazebo, reading. I was reading until I took out this laptop John gave me and began writing this blog. John, who read most of the day, is taking a nap. There is ice-tea, gin and tonics and white wine being consumed as people read.

Not much going on. And that is pretty much what is going on in the house with the amusing name 'Andromeda Strand' on East Beach Road on Long Beach on Oak Island. Five of us went into Southport for lunch at the Southport Provision Company which has a boat charter service and 'advise' as well as a restaurant right on the water in open air. Conch fritters, onion rings, tuna sandwiches, crab cake sandwiches, steamed clams, potato salad and cucumber salad were consumed along with John's incongruous hamburger, along with beer. Mimi, Sherry  and Bern went to Yoga this morning and John and I went to breakfast--biscuits and sausage gravy and grits for me. Tim slept in.

Other than that, reading and conversation and laughter and irony and humor and a great deal of silence when people are reading, which is almost constantly. I'm on my 4th book in 4 days--The Cuckoo's Calling which J.K. Rowling (think Harry Potter) wrote under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith. Very good. People occasionally go bob in the surf or look for shells or don't.

Not a lot of 'doing' going on.

The ocean waxes and wanes and purrs. The birds fly up and down and stop to eat. We can see a mile in either direction and right now, in that two miles, there are maybe 30 people to be seen. On the beach, not much going on....At the Andromeda Stand, more 'being' than 'doing'....

"Being" is what makes it 'being there...'

There...

We arrived (John, Sherry, Bern and me) on  Saturday (after the two days in Travel Hell and John's Land Rover) about 4 pm, Mimi and Tim flew to Raleigh and got here about 5.

Since then (it's Tuesday noon now) it's pretty much what I said it would be: lots of laughter and the gentle teasing of love; lots and lots of good food and great weather; white wine, boutique beer and white wine; all of us sleeping well and reading at least a book a day; and birds, lots and lots of birds.

I watched this morning from the gazebo half-way between the deck and the steps down to beach level while 60 or70 gulls of several types lined up in double file to stare out to sea from the water's edge. They're still there several hours later, patient and hopeful as early Christians facing into the rising sun to see if today is the day the Lord returns. I don't know what they're doing. I may go down to the ocean in a while to see if they fly away and then come back for whatever conference or meeting or workshop they are attending.

Besides several species of gulls, there are grackles, sandpipers, swirling terns, tiny seabirds that feed on the cochinos the waves bring in and run back to dry when the next wave arrives. And pigeons, I don't remember so many pigeons on Oak Island before. They seem to be nesting in the roof of the gazebo. If you're quiet you can hear the young pigeons rustling above your head. (Pigeons, I happen to know, stay in the nest months longer than any other bird--until they're almost grown. Which, by the way, is why you never see baby pigeons....)

In the marshes north of the beach--Long Beach is a south facing beach, so if you're staring out to sea you should imagine the Caribbean rather than Europe--there are the herons and other long-legged, long-necked, graceful birds.

And then there are the pelicans, confederation after confederation of them. Oak Island is a major breeding ground for Brown Pelicans and they soar and dive and fly in breathless formations up and down the beach with what seems to be some Grand Purpose in mind. I love the pelicans, so grave and serious, so acrobatic and adept--their shadows proceeding or following them up the beach in their group flights. (Since it is a south facing beach the sun moves down the beach from east to west, never shining in your face as you look toward the Bahamas.)

Tim, Mimi and Sherry just got back from buying shrimp, fish (and if I correctly identify the other bags from Fruit and Brew) an abundance of alcoholic items.

I best go, since the quiet time always ends when people return from foraging (hunter-gatherers with credit cards are we....)

Almost there...

On the morning after next, Bern and I will drive Bela to the kennel and then go to New Haven where we'll meet John Anderson and Sherry Ellis and start driving toward Oak Island, North Carolina. We take two days down and two days back. On Saturday afternoon, Mimi and Tim will arrive in the car they rented in Raleigh after flying from NYC. Then will come, arguably, my favorite 7 days of the year. With those folks in a beach front house on an island off the coast of Southport, NC. Some of my favorite people in the whole world, together for a whole week, on a beach, with nothing we 'need' to do or 'have' to do. Just being together with salt and sea and sand and pelicans and lots of good food.

I think I've told you Bern and I went to Oak Island for the first time in either 1975 or 76. And we went every year for about 20 years after that until our children rebelled that it was 'too boring'. But we've gone back, thanks to Mimi and Tim, who re-discovered it 5 years ago. Mimi, Tim, John, Bern and I are constant. This is Sherry's third year. We're staying in a house named The Andromeda Strain--for some reason.

It will be wondrous and good. It will be hot during the day--and if the air is 87, the ocean will be 85--the Gulf Stream runs around Oak Island. And it will be cooler at night and the sky will be amazing, even with the ambient light from Southport off to the left. you can see the Milky Way, which you can't see in Cheshire.

And these wondrous people will read and be quiet most of the time, and cook incredible meals and we will drink wine and sleep deeply and wake each morning to be present to 'family', though John and Sherry and Tim aren't really blood.

The only thing missing will be the other 6 people who are my family: Josh and Cathy and the three granddaughters--Emma, Morgan and Tegan--and Jack Ellis, Sherry's husband, who has to work and can't come to Oak Island.

That makes, finally 12 people, exactly the only 12 people Bela, our Puli, loves. But Bela can't come to the beach since he travels badly and barks most of the time he's in a car. For a two day trip both ways, that would get real old, real fast.

But that's where we'll be. I'll try to use someone's laptop to add to Under the Castor Oil Tree if I can. But if I'm not here for 10 days or so, know this, I am with people I love profoundly in a place I've loved for much of my life and we are eating well. And being happy just to be in the same space, whether we talk or not.

Perfect vacation is what I call that....

I saw you standing alone....

I just went out to look at it--the 'blue moon'. A tad disappointing, not blue at all. But it is a deal of some significance.

A 'blue moon', in case you wondered, is the third full moon during a season. Most seasons (winter, spring, etc.) have only three new moons. Why it is the third of four and not the fourth, I can't tell you. I never said I was an expert in moons.

When it happens in August it has lots of other names--some from Native Americans and some from ancient cultures elsewhere. A blue moon during the harvest is a big time deal apparently.

But the thing is this: it isn't 'blue' at all.