VIRGINIA BEACH
I sat in the car a much of yesterday and woke up today in Virginia Beach where the Mahy family, my son-in-law Todd‘s family, is having a week long gathering. Lisa and her children, Lulu and Kalifa, have escaped the trauma of her office building burning down in Bellingham Washington by arriving first. Sister Sara also arrived last night from Washington with husband, Doug and two children Kaia and Lyle and a large van so piled with food that they could barely see out.
After a bagel breakfast some of us walked on the beach that is only a few hundred yards across from our inland waterway side, where we have a great view of the water, across a narrow strip of land, with the ocean on the other side. We are in a huge rental house with endless bedrooms for the 22 people who will be here.
I will write more about our gathering. But what struck me this morning as we walked on the wide clean beach was how lucky I have been to be able to walk on the beach so often in the last two years: Naousa, Greece; Essouiria, Morocco; Bellingham, Washington (boat rides); Huntington Beach, California; Emerald Island, North Carolina; Haarlem, Netherlands; Naousa, again, and now Virginia Beach.
Today as we looked out at the Atlantic I imagined niece Henny and Chiara Walking on the beach near Haarlem on the other side of the Atlantic as they often do. The beach with its clean sand and breaking waves and endless views is so refreshing and so different from the strip malls we rode by yesterday.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 