This morning I lamented to anybody listening it feels like we’ve been in the car for three days. We have, kinda. Sunday afternoon we arrived road-weary at my ex-sister-in-law’s-but-still-my-sister’s Mt. Pleasant home (we  just call it Charleston, it’s close enough) for a long overdue visit, first one in the flesh in too many years. One 23-y-o young man who belongs to me met us there in a questionable car, unscathed if rattled. My ex-sis-but-still-sis rolled out the red carpet for us with a proper Southern dinner set upon a gracious Southern table, vegetarian style.

Her co-hostess is the Best Black Lab in the World, all but impossible to photograph. This sweet Lab was also the most patient dog in the world, willing for a dog-deprived woman to wallow in her dog-ness for a long while. Good girl, Waco.

Yesterday morning three of us struck out for a longish, steamy walk while Handsome Chef Boyfriend undertook an ambitious jog from the house to the center of Charleston’s jaw-dropping Arthur Ravenel Bridge, about a seven-mile trek out and back in the heat, all told. Meanwhile I tried to capture the Spanish moss that is so defining of the landscape in the deep coastal South.

Our time there was delightful end to end, far too brief. We had only a little while after our walk for a geeky camera tête-à-tête (I’m still a newbie, pressing our more camera-savvy hostess for answers to hey-how-do-I-work-this-thing kinds of questions), and not much else before HCB gently reminded us it was time to hit the road. Again.

Thence to Wilmington, NC, the 23-y-o rattling down the road behind us in heavy traffic and persistent rain. Navigation misled us once, but we finally arrived, rumpled and weary. There was time only for the grocery, a quick dinner, and welcome sleep.

But today! Today was beach day. In the intervening years since my move to Vermont I have had occasion to walk the craggy beaches near Camden, Maine (a very different kind of coastline than North Carolina’s to be sure), and to sniff the surf of the Jersey shore once on a frigid day when I was miserably sick with a head cold. Being here with my boys—both of them—is restorative and wonderful. The skies rained on us this morning and then relented. We gathered our things and took off for nearby Wrightsville Beach.

We are eating well, too much, enjoying each other’s company and also indulging in the luxury of doing nothing at all, except being together. We have a few other things on agenda in the coming days, more stories to come.