Beaching It!

Julia and I took our second beach trip this summer - yay! I adore a day at the beach, and I'm so tickled to live this close to a great Atlantic beach -- we can just drive over for a few hours, and drive back. The ferry ride to Cherry Point afforded large river vistas packed with cloud.

Clouds in the river below ~

Clouds in the vault above ~

We go to Fort Macon, which is the north end of a long run of public beach along the NC coast. It's fairly easy to get away from people.

Different types of people frequent a summer beach. I am a shell-collector. I stroll along in a dawdling, mindless way, nudging the sand with my toe, hiding behind my hat brim, swirling my sarong with one hand and cradling a mass of shell treasure in the other.

A tiny cup of shell contains such a world!
Do you collect for color? Shape? Perfection? Do you reject broken ones? Common ones? Little or big ones?

In only a single camera shot, hundreds of shells, each unique. Why do I choose one, reject another? I don't always know.

Today I searched for shells with holes that yarn could pass through. I'd like to make a wind chime with shells, crocheting the shells right onto the yarn. What do you think?

This one will work -- an opening runs through it.

And this one. I think a wind chime with shells like this would be charming.

What a swirly little shell! Look at that design -- so perfect. It's a pattern design called the fibonacci sequence, and it's found all through nature. I watched a fun informational video recently on it.

When I see the same design in widely divergent locations in the universe, I see the hand of a creator, a designer.
I found a shell for Adam and me too.

I could spend a few paragraphs telling you about the unusual people I studied at the beach today. Couples, individuals, families. The beach presents entertaining opportunities to view behavior and relationships. One young woman, who seemed to be on her honeymoon, wore a dress the whole time -- into the water, while sunbathing. I found this odd, a 3/4-length sleeve knit dress, rather heavy, with a high neck, falling just below her knee. I assumed she was just very modest, if warm. Later she tied a wrap-around skirt on as well, over the dress, and then pulled the dress's skirt portion up, through the wrap-around skirt's waist, and then dropped it back down, so the wrap-around was underneath. And she wore them both then, and sat and sunbathed some more. I could make no sense of it. Otherwise she was a lovely, ordinary, slim young lady with pretty hair. She pulled out a bottle of mousse, squirted a poof of it into her palm, and rubbed it well into her long hair after emerging from the salt water. I couldn't figure that out either. On the beach, you are left to wonder why people do what they do. Quite a bit of personal grooming, fussing over clothes (and their lack), towels, hair, skin. One young woman, whose bathing suit supplied neither the support nor the coverage of the garments in an underwear drawer, gently pulled down the edge of her mother's modest bathing suit top because the older woman was showing about an inch of waist. That made me giggle.

My favorite thing to do at the beach is walk. Shell-collecting eventually becomes an excuse to walk on and on. I walk until no one's in front of me. Today I loved it so much, I felt I could have walked this shore forever, going and going. I find the ocean's sounds, the water's caresses, the broad sky and salty air to be my perfect habitat. So many shells littered the shoreline that the little waves rolled them over each other. They clinked and tinkled like jewelry.

My new beach hat prevented any sunburn on my face. My nose is thanking me.

The hat's underside -- I'm picky about hats. This one has a red bow on the back, covering a velcro closure. The top allows me to pile my hair on my head in a big clip, while still wearing a hat.

Julia promised me that she'd willingly pose for a photo or two without giving me an ugly face.

I got our magnificent kite up in the air, and she enjoyed it for a while at the very end of its line.

It's way up there, even though the string only looks about an inch long in this photo!

Pulling it in ~

Some of you live far from the ocean, and you miss it. So here's a short video for you, so you can hear the surf and see the waves. You can catch the girl in the dress briefly on the left hand side of the video.