DAY
ELEVEN
I will never tire of seeing the
sunrises here. Each morning when I wake
up around 6 a.m. the sun is just beginning to come up over the mountains to the
east. The sky is just beginning to turn
shades of pink and purple. Then, as the
coffee is brewing, the sky begins its first hints that the day is breaking and
the big orange ball of light will break over the horizon. Suddenly, there it is…so bright you cannot
look at it, with an intensity that is overpowering, overwhelming. Some days, when it is warm enough to sit on
the porch that faces east, we sit and talk and have our coffee but have to look
away, because the sun’s brightness cannot be tolerated by our eyes. The beauty of the sea is enough to
concentrate on if one cannot look in the direction of the mountains. The ever changing tidal flow brings a constant
parade of birds, visiting the rocks where the tide has deposited their
breakfast, as they hunt each crack and crevice to see what may be revealed to
them. They circle the area, choosing the
place to land that may bring them what they need at the moment, some morsel of
seafood that will satisfy them for a while.
The work in the harbor goes on. The big digging machine has returned to do
its work once more, dredging up big portions of mud and silt to deposit in the
dump trucks that come and go on a regular basis. They work against the tide that is out for
the moment but will return in the next few hours. They take mud and silt that has formed over
months and years and take it to some place that only they know about and then
return to take another load. Who knows
where the mud and silt will spend the future?
It is not needed here because the sea will bring more to take its
place. The work begins early, despite
its location being close to the campers who are vacationing just up the hill
overlooking the harbor. The rush to
shore up the harbor before the sea returns takes precedence over the needs of
vacationers who only want to fish and relax by the shore.
The noise of the machines does not
bother us. We are up early each morning
to greet the day and the sunrise, as if my internal alarm clock is telling me
that something special is on the horizon and I need to be up to see what it
is. I have rarely had a need for an
alarm clock to help me get up. I can
tell myself the time I need to get up and it usually happens right on schedule.
Joy can be found in the daily routine
if we just take the time to notice it around us in our lives. Certainly being away in a place of beauty of
rest assists our emotional awareness to come alive but the same can be
practiced even at home in our normal routine when we take the time to truly
notice what is around us.
We are eating seafood nearly
every day. Today we ate fish twice, once
as fish and chips for lunch when we ate in a nice park and then again this
evening as we cooked fish at our cottage along with a few scallops, some eggplant,
and a rice pilaf I made. Seafood is
plentiful here and relatively cheap when compared to our prices in Texas. A pound of scallops costs 14 dollars but if
you buy them in Austin or even Bastrop they cost almost twice that amount. Even the cheapest frozen ones you can find in
Austin cost 18 dollars. So, we have been
eating them a couple times a week at least.
There is a seafood company right
here in Parker’s Cove. It is called
Nautical Seafood and they have a processing plant/warehouse facility just up
the hill from our cottage. They buy
seafood from the boats that use the wharf and do a lot to take care of the
harbor. They have a small restaurant
that sells chowder and lobster rolls too.
We intend to try both of those items before we leave here.
Everyone we have met so far here is
very friendly. People love to talk to us
and when they find out we are from Texas they ask questions about Texas just
like we ask questions about where they are from. One woman who has never been to Texas told us
that she thought Texas was one big flat prairie. She was surprised to learn that Texas has a
variety of landscapes including mountains and coastal areas.
Many people here have never been to
Texas. If they have been to the United
States they have gone to Florida or New York or Massachusetts. Few have traveled to the western United
States. When they learn that we drove
all the way from Texas here they cannot believe it. One woman said she could never ride that
far.
Part of the joy and pleasure of
travel is learning from other that you meet wherever you go. Today we met a woman who told us about a
place where you can hear Irish singers. She
is of Irish background and told us about a group who sings on Cape Breton
Island and about the Irish lullabies and ballads they sing. She asked us if we knew a certain song and
when we said we did not she began singing it for us. We were standing on the street and she began
to sing, not caring about who may be listening. She had a beautiful voice and when she
stopped singing and I told her how beautiful her voice was, she laughed and
told me that it was not and began to kid about singing on the street. She told us the name of a place called Red
Shoe Pub on Cape Breton where we could go to hear such songs being sung. We enjoyed visiting with her very much and
wanted it to go on.
We often learn from others about
what they enjoy and share with them about what we enjoy doing. We often find that we have a lot more in
common than we realized.
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