Another American Adventure: to the beach and back

Friday, January 27, 2012

to the beach and back

Jubilee didn't waste any time going into the surf. Beach was mostly deserted, even though it is in the high 60s today.

Coming home ...

Trees are dark and winding here ...

... dripping with Spanish moss.

FAs door ...

Over to Fresh Fields to get some food ...

Frogs are still there, but these look like new ones to me ...

It is a colorful place with expensive stuff ...

This is the Low Country, so mysteriously beautiful. When I am here I feel myself caught in a shadow of the past. The black workers (in the stores, at the gates, in the gardens) smile with radiant warmth, the shoppers and beach walkers so gently (and genuinely?) friendly, while the sun and landscape carry it all with both grace and a dark unknown.

4 comments:

BarbaraJanuary 27, 2012 at 4:17 PM
Sounds like you have landed back home. Glad you had a safe trip. What a different landscape!
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beth cioffolettiJanuary 28, 2012 at 3:48 AM
not quite, Barbara. I am visiting with my sister in Kiawah Island S.C. for a couple of days.
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Sally ClayJanuary 28, 2012 at 4:45 AM
Beautiful pictures
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beth cioffolettiJanuary 28, 2012 at 5:36 AM
it is beautiful here, Sally. Hard not to get good pictures.
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"In those first days, people said, a squirrel could run the long length of Pennsylvania without ever touching the ground. In those first days, the woods were white oak and chestnut, hickory, maple, sycamore, walnut, wild ash, wild plum, and white pine. The pine grew on the ridgetops where the mountains' lumpy spines stuck up and their skin was thinnest.

"The wilderness was uncanny, unknown. Benjamin Franklin had already invented his stove in Philadelphia by 1753, and Thomas Jefferson was a schoolboy in Virginia; French soldiers had been living in forts along Lake Erie for two generations. But west of the Alleghenies in western Pennsylvania, there was not even a settlement, not even a cabin. No Indians lived there, or even near there.

"Wild grapevines tangled the treetops and shut out the sun. Few songbirds lived in the deep woods. Bright Carolina parakeets - red, green, and yellow - nested in the dark forest. There were ravens then, too. Woodpeckers rattled the big trees' trunks, ruffed grouse whirred their tail feathers in the fall, and every long once in a while a nervous gang of empty-headed turkeys came hustling and kicking through the leaves - but no one heard any of this, no one at all."

Annie Dillard, An American Childhood.