Eternal

All change is not growth, as all movement is not forward. ~Ellen Glasgow

Here near the site of the first Wright brother’s flight, we spend a morning on the beach at Kill Devil Hills. The hike over the dunes puts all signs of man at our backs, and for a while we waddle in the waves. The dogs are a little less eager. The eternal song of water on sand is a welcome break from the clock and the road and our destination on the other side of the continent.

Beach

Memories from my last visit here clobber me rather unexpectedly, a break from college twenty-five years ago, leaving Ithaca, NY in a Spring snowstorm, driving an Orange Hornet non-stop to the warmth of this very place…did we camp somewhere, Laurie and I? I did not know then that she would move down here a short time later, and that I could not help but follow, and that this was an early chapter in a very long and emotional book.

The Atlantic Ocean

The dogs bark, bringing me back to the present, and I look around at the sun glittering on the water, and at my two girls shrieking with pleasure in the waves, and at a sky, a sky of the most unusual and surprising depth and color, and I am reminded that this now, this-here-now, this instant and this instant and this instant, eternally, this is what matters.

The Atlantic Ocean

Sometimes I forget.

The Atlantic Ocean off the Outer Banks

Kill Devil Hills, United States