DUD - AKL

There are only two seasons at the Ruins. One of them hatches seagulls, and the other stacks the beach with stormy foam. The walls are paper thin. It was good to hear every sound the wind makes until your ears freeze. Gutters stacked with sleet, and we rolled away to the next thing. Dark plane windows over cold alps, and suddenly, it's the tropical pacific again.

Grassrut

When we first came here, there was some line about a well-worn path to the sea in my head. It's there in real life now, and still in my head. Thoreau used his path to Walden Pond to show how boring and trodden old lines of thought can be. He might be right. But this thigh-deep grass has a leg rut worn right into it, slithering to the swale and out. Above the stepping stones down to the waves, flax leaves flap and the sound of the ocean comes out all at once from behind the bushes. That's where you stand. For as long as it takes.

Green Island

A related note of preemptive nostalgia concerns this nubbin of schist off in the bight. It's one of the first things I see from my porch everyday. Or the kitchen window. Or the beach, or the hill. Green Island is usually up to its neck in spray or fog, and always suffused with a perfectly mysterious something-or-other. Very close. Very far.