STARRY NIGHTS ✧ STARRY-EYED DAYS
STARRY NIGHTS ✧ STARRY-EYED DAYS
What is it about laying on my back gazing up into the brilliant, starry island night sky watching for falling stars that makes me feel incredibly young and incredibly ancient all at the same time? Far from city-bred light pollution, our stars are so visibly bigger and brighter, sprinkled as they are high above the stillness of a flat-calm Bogue Sound or the rolling, white-foamed and midnight-blue waves receding on the oceanside beach. The moon rises from the east but over the Atlantic Ocean, adding her reflection to the night aura. Tiny baby sea turtles are drawn to the luminous ocean as they emerge sand-sprinkled from their nest near the dune to make their first tentative crawl to the sea.
I have raised three island-bred children and have welcomed three grandsons and two granddaughters and soon will welcome two more. Each of my ocean children love the salty joy of hours spent in the waves or on a rustic sound-side dock with fishing pole in hand, cast net ever ready to capture bait or small shrimp. Although Pokémon GO walks have temporarily replaced our traditional flashlight crab walks down the beach at night with our procession of siblings and cousins ages 6 months to 16 years, I know that one day, they too will hold the tiny hands of their first-born children and teach them all the ocean lore passed down from each generation of our beach-loving family. I know you are a beach lover too and your friends and family enjoy special rituals and traditions each time you
get away for those magical few days to your favorite island home.
Our early family beach photographs were mostly shot by my father using his newspaperman’ s camera, a Rolleiflex from the 1960s. He gave me my first 35mm camera when I was 15 and I reveled in taking photos of my friends, sunrises, my surfing boyfriend( now husband), then later my babies on the beach, and now my tiniest and newest granddaughter on our dock one steamy, dusky July evening with a curtain of marsh grass as her backdrop. The rite of passage today for our older grandchildren is their first phone; no cumbersome lenses and 35mm cameras for them. With dragonfly speed, their phones come out, they lean in, then away, and grin as the oldest snaps a selfie and they have captured that precious moment in time, smallest to tallest, on a perfectly brilliant late-summer day. Stars of their own vacation photos and videos, starry-eyed with the pure essence of a childhood blessed by cousins and memories being made on these long beach days on Emerald Isle.
Julia Bat ten Wax