We spent Thanksgiving at the beach this year. We used to go there every two years, but that went on hold with Covid. This was our first year to recommence. It began with packing for a four day sojourn, then a three hour drive to the North Carolina coast. As a young person in Southern California I used to fantasize living on the East Coast of the US, especially the beaches, so unlike those in California. I only knew them from books of course, books about sea marshes, horses, and adventures, but those books set up a yearning in my pre-teen heart to smell salty air, ride a pony on the sand by the ocean, row a dinghy on the marsh and see terns, gulls, and pelicans up close, or even chance upon an alligator!!
So now, I can go there. No ponies on the beach, but a marsh ebbing and flowing with the tide and bird watching on the ocean shore, this time for real. There are wild ponies on the Outer Banks, a herd of descendants from Spanish mustangs who are now cared for by a charity organized for that purpose. There are none on the mainland. That is a trip I will make next spring. Maybe. The list to do all the things I couldn’t do after my fall grows longer by the day.
Still, this foggy, rainy November suits my mood. I love being near the ocean, Pacific or Atlantic, when the weather is like this, somehow enveloped in nostalgia – for what, I don’t know, but it seems eternal and familiar, like the briny mix life is said to have emerged from.
Yet we are happy together, grown children and grands, sisters and cousins, despite the weather.
I have made a corn pudding, my first, and it seems to be a success, but only a crumb of the bounty laid upon the Thanksgiving table loaded with oyster dressing, dressing without oysters, green bean casserole, broccoli, fresh green beans, mashed potatoes, two kinds of gravy, freshly made cranberry sauce, canned cranberry sauce, turkey, of course, and ham. I’ve probably left something out. Then desserts: pumpkin pies with whipped cream, blondies and the apple galette I made that morning with the help of my 18 year old granddaughter. Not a southern US recipe, but from Jacque Pepin. Maybe Southern France.
We walked on the beach, meandered through a craft market, watched movies together.
And now, I’m back home, putting up Christmas decorations, alone again, glad to be. Love being with my family, love being on my own. A perk of being older, in my view, though one season seems to rush into the next now, fall, winter, spring, summer again, marked by holidays and events, pleasant mostly, but seamless, events strung along a collective consciousness that is sometimes chaotic in the living of it, but which time has made smooth.
There is an enough-ness to my life now that always eluded me, thinking I was not in the right place at the right time, the wrong person with the wrong people, searching always. I’m grateful to have lived long enough to be able to say I’m enough – it’s enough. I’ve worked for it.