A Week at the Beach
Relaxing at the beach
I spent eight days at the beach last week with family and friends: both sets of children plus all five grandchildren and a big group of lifelong friends from Denver. There was beach-sitting, beach-walking, big, raucous dinners, trips to nearby towns to peruse book and fabric stores and buy groceries, time for reading and playing board games and watching movies.
It was all glorious.
We’ve been coming to this same beach—Arch Cape, on the North Coast of Oregon—for over forty years now. My late mother-in-law discovered it when she rented a cabin owned by friends of hers. Once we visited, we were smitten. And we’ve been coming ever since, finding various homes to rent depending on how many of us are coming. It’s a residential-only area a few miles south of the more populous and touristy Cannon Beach, and about five miles north of charming Manzanita. Close enough to both to drive in for groceries or other shopping, but much more secluded. There’s a long stretch of beach between Capes and at one end a lovely creek streams out of the mountains. Even on a weekend summer day there are very few people on the beach.
Did I mention it’s glorious?
We set up a tent by an arrangement of logs and a fire pit and hung out there day after day. The weather was perfect—mid-seventies and sunny all week. (Often when it’s hot in Portland, it gets foggy and/or windy at the coast. But not this time.) Every day, I carried a backpack filled with my knitting and current reading material to the beach. And every day mostly what I did was stare at the water: sunlight sparkling on the waves, pelicans flying gracefully by in squadrons (one of their official collective noun names), whale blow sighting just beyond the breakers.
Some mornings I wrote, either on the outside deck or in a sweet little spot under the eaves of the cabin. But mostly I didn’t worry much about working. It was relaxing and restful and just what I needed. I’m gearing up to publish a novel at the end of September (more on that soon) and there are a million and one things to do around that launch. But for one week, one blissful week, all I had to do was sit on the sand and watch the waves roll in and out and worry about nothing more than whether or not we had enough wine for Happy Hour.
It was hard leaving the beach and driving back into the hot, dry, golden city. But one quickly acclimates and here I am, feeling ready to get back at it.
Writing on the deck, on a rare cloudy morning. It cleared soon after.
The perfect writing hideyho under the eaves.