beach living

It's that perfect time of year when we can open the sliding glass doors to the ocean and enjoy our morning coffee without sweating our asses off in the southeastern North Carolina heat and humidity.  I've been back to hot showers for the passed week though I have not had to turn on my electric blanket yet.  In fact, I feel the electric blanket days may be over.  May be.  It also occurs to me that I've slept in the same bed every night for 84 consecutive nights.  That hasn't happened since spring of 1994.

The ocean is rough today.  White caps as far as the eye can see and waves breaking  25 feet out pulling white foam all the way up to the shore line.  There is a crispness to the air though not bitter like up north.  It feels like fall but it's not painful.  My bones aren't beginning to chatter as they have for the past 13 years.  I want to bake apple pies and pumpkin tarts.  I miss my daily 3pm Dunkin Donuts pumpkin coffee on my way to the music school most of all.

I love autumn.  The way the smells hang in the air just a little better than any other time of year.  There's something wonderful about the smell of a food truck scrapple egg and cheese on a kaiser or a cheesesteak with fried onions.  The smell the passed few weekends on the boardwalk reminds me of my Oxford Ave rooftop.  I am sad to know Britts is now closed for the season and I sense a depression to living on the beach in winter creeping in.  Now I'm looking forward to my move into the city.

Almost every night this week I've been able to sit outside and play and listen to music.  This is a town of musicians.  The sheer numbers of them seem to match that of Nashville.  Everyone plays and/or sings.  Everyone.  The Nashville players are all monsters and the ones who are any less don't stay in town very long.  Around here, most of them are great players.  Some of them not so much.  But the love of playing is unequalled.  People here play simply because they love it. 

Friday night's stop was the first Irish pub I've been to since moving.  Although I find, like many other things down here, the term "Irish pub" is used loosely.  Still, they had Guinness on tap and it was the most Irish pub-by place I've been since Philadelphia.  I sat on the back deck they called a Beer Garden and listened to a conglomeration of local players and drank my Guinness out of an embossed pint glass.  My thoughts drifted to the set of glass Guinness tankards packed away up north.  And not so much the mugs themselves but the best friend who is packed away with them.  The term best friend is not used loosely here though it is a term of the past that tonight makes me mutter "sonuvabitch" under my breath. 

You really would have liked this.



"My life is very exciting now.  Nostalgia for what?  It's like climbing a staircase.  I'm on top of the staircase, I look behind and see the steps.  That's where I was.  We're here right now.  Tomorrow, we'll be someplace else.  So why nostalgia?"  ~Jeanne Moreau