After the Nor’easter

We had quite a nor’easter last week and this weekend was a most welcome break from that. Three or four days of incessant rain and gloom is enough to make anyone cranky. So two or three days of sunshine and warmth is a very welcome break from that.

Over the weekend I went out to Good Harbor Beach — so did everyone else north of Boston — and I discovered that the beach got bigger. It got bigger because the storm caused considerable dune erosion. I was stunned at how much was lost. And all along Nautilus Road the beach roses took a bad beating. The part of Nautilus Road by the swim club was completely underwater at high tide for several days. Men with shovels and rakes were out there putting the rocks back in the ocean and raking up the remains of the beautiful marsh grasses and the beach rose bushes. They will grow back, of course, but everything looks so open now.

Out along the back shore a backhoe was hard at work putting rocks the size of coffeetables back in the ocean. There too the beach roses were gone. I don’t know how long it will take them to grow back but I will miss them. That fresh slightly-rosy/slightly-astringent fragrance is one of my favorite parts of summer.

The bridge is out again. That is sad and the tidal creek is a great deal wider than it used to be. Mark told me that for the first time in 55 years of living in that house the water came over their seawall. Not badly, he repaired the damage with a shovel in less than an hour, but it was a shock.

It is an unsettling thing to see a world that is an everyday part of your life change so dramatically in just a few days. Still it is very beautiful. Over the weekend the tides remained quite high, though not over their normal boundaries. But the color of the water was breathtaking. It is as though all that pounding and hammering and crashing had a cleansing effect and the water, as it swept over the beach, was the most intoxicating pallette of colors. I wished I had remembered my camera. There was the clear, sunny blue of the reflected sky accented by areas of the most breathtaking azure, and low spots of a misty violet.

All the surfers were out. Those folks are nuts. The crazier the waves get the happier they are — a good reminder that what I might call awful is pure joy to someone else. It is fun to watch them pull up in their jeeps and trucks leaning out of the windows to study the waves and going into paroxysms of joy when they see how terribly high and wild they are. They jump out of their vehicles, scramble into their shiny black wet suits making them look like cartoon seals with bright surfboards, and run toward the roaring waves looking for that one that will give them the thrill they live for. I love to watch them. They are so serious about their happiness.

So nature once again has shown us a thing or two and now we have to adjust to smaller dunes, fewer beach roses, and the birds will have to adjust their daily schedules. But it is April and the sun is shining and life is good.

Today is William Shakespeare’s birthday. Shakespeare, more than any other writer of his time, loved and made generous use of words and language. His works contain over 30,000 different words some of which he created and which have gone on to grace our language even now. It is April. Anything can happen.

Thanks for reading.