Blustery Windy Ocean

I have escaped to the top of the beach house with a laptop, notebook, cup of coffee, and have turned the chair to face the huge windows. For two days it has stormed -- the kind of heavy-handed, windy storming I long for in California. It's the kind of storming that froths the waves, makes foam blow down the beach like tumbleweed, that turns the ocean color of rough slate. It makes the dunes' sea oats and pampas bob and bow as the grasses change colors in the storm light, become blue and purple, their feathery heads almost glowing.

The windows are cracked in front of me and wind whips inside in ribbons of cool. It is sweatshirt weather, fall weather. I'm sure when the sun returns, we will be back to summer again, but in the meantime, we bundle up and are reminded of season shifts.

Staying at the beach during storms is entirely sensory: yesterday I look a long shower in the outdoor shower -- cold wind rushed through the wide spaces between the slats as the water poured out as hot as I could take it. Heaven. Later in the day my sister Kaia Joye and I went for a long walk in the wind, which ended up being in the driving rain. Sand blew like needles into the backs of our legs and cold rain soaked our clothes. But the beach was scattered with treasures: whole hinged clams, palm-sized jelly fish (sea jellies), a puffer fish, hollow whole crab shells, jackknife clams. Then another hot shower, and an evening of wind blowing in through the screen door, and wide dark clouds bulging and blowing above us as we made dinner.

Dinner was lobsters. Justin drove down from Rhode Island yesterday with a cooler full of lobsters, so there was lobster racing on the kitchen floor, lobster "hugs" as their long rubber-band-ed claws spread across the children's' chests, and of course hot lobster with butter for dinner.

Silas, Finny, and Eden have all found me now, so it's time to go back downstairs with my now-cold coffee.