Sabbath day observance

06 July 2008

I keep a notebook full of the ways I see God in my life each day. Some entries relate His nature's beauty, some His encouraging trials, all describe the tender mercy of my God who never forgets me.

Yesterday He gave me rain. Rain in torrents that veiled the windows and littered the forest's leaves to its floor. Lightening that lit up the sky more beautifully than any fireworks show. Thunder that rumbled like the deep breathing of the earth itself; I had forgotten the way thunder jostles the air and ripples through you- tangible.

Mrs. Lobauch let me sit on her porch to watch the heavens empty on her sodden Carolina forest. My parents sat inside to chat, but I sat in a stiff deck chair and let the heavy wet air embraced me. Here I breathed in thick breaths of my favorite air on earth.

This morning smelled like the sweet wet of a Carolina summer storm. This is the smell of home. They pray for rain here to water their summer-parched earth. I pray to thank God for His rain that watered my desert-parched soul.

Buried treasure

05 July 2008

34.479 N
77.445 W

Seriously.
If you can find it, we'll even let you keep it.

Uncle Greg buried it for the little kids on Tuesday, but their pirate-y treasure-finding skills were no match for his pirate-y burying skills. Actually, everyone looked for it. And it's still safely buried.

Looks like this round goes to Cap'n Greg.

Building sandcastles

04 July 2008

Fourth of July at the beach is the coconut smell of sunscreen, sand in your ears (and nose, eyes and hair), Grandma's giant bucket of licorice, and most of all my daddy's sandcastles. In our backyard we build tree forts, and on graph paper he sketches space stations, but on the Carolina coastline he turns sand into towers, walls and palaces: a fortress for an afternoon.

He started after breakfast. With the shovel and a few buckets-- "see, we'll carve out a channel here and the water'll sort of wash out to a delta over there... this hole we'll dig down to the water table and the moat can drain into here..."

A bridge, a tunnel, two fortresses with access roads, a giant hill in the dry moat-lake, and towers of drip castles on every level. Daddy took a lunch break, but just for a bit; low tide is the very best time for building.

He looked a bit like a kid out there, kneeling in the middle of his piles of sand, patting down the walls, and dribbling up the towers. I built up the battlements, the guard hills and towers. Jack got knighted Head Castle Protector and helped dig out the moat. Sussy and Brigham picked shells for decoration and the neighbors came by to stare.

"Will it be there tomorrow?" the little boy asked.

"We'll see." said his dad.

"Not a chance." I promised.

About dinner time the tide rolled in, just like it always will, and we finally stood back from our masterpiece and watched it slowly melt.

"You know, I was thinking we should've set up a camera and made stop-motion clips of it washing out."

"I was thinking the same thing! But we should show the whole thing build up first and then wash out."

"There goes the first bridge!"

"Yeah, didn't expect that one to last long"

Daddy chuckled, "Nothing's supposed to last long— it is a sandcastle."

Topsail Island, 6:45 am

01 July 2008

The Ocean entices too many off the creative brink called Poetry, like some siren song seducing every vacationer's pen. It is glorious to see the horizon curve around, full to the brim with greyblue. And the gangly seabirds that peck in the surf simply beg to be likened to something. Perhaps it's the early sunlight: blinding pink to the east, stretching my lanky shadow to the west. But I'm determined not to compose another beached whale of clichés. In fact, I'd rather just sit, still. Left well enough alone, the Ocean is its own poetry.