Friday night I dreamed of riding my bike to Hunting Island and then I awakened on Saturday morning to birds singing outside my bedroom window and all of the snow and ice melted and gone.
February has been full of the most snow and ice in my entire memory. The sun has seldom visited. Boston and New York are getting hit for the 6th time with several feet of snow.
Now it is 9:00 am and 30 degrees with rain as I start out. In Union, it is 31', The shoulders of the road are wet, red and muddy Whitmire 32', Pomaria 33', then 34'. Columbia is 35' As the temperature creeps up, so does the price of gas.
A huge mobile home passes me from Illinois: MY IKON RV says its plate, then comes Quebec, Ontario, Arizona, Minnesota, Massachusetts, fleeing south out of the blizzards.
Down 21 South, a bridge is out and I detour. I pass the Dukes Harley Funeral Home and then in Orangburg in the Burger King, there is a fly. Could this be the first sign of Spring. I look for jasmine hanging from trees, red buds with pink flowers leaning over the road but there are none. There are daffodils and jonquils blooming and the trees are beginning to unfurl tiny red beginnings of leaves. The ditches are filled with black water.
The rain is pouring in Beaufort and it is 41 degrees.
By some miracle as I enter Hunting Island, the rain ceases. I walk down the beach around the drowned trees to the camp ground and then round back on the Magnolia Forest Trail. Along the way I pass great trees, their arms stretched upward, draped in voluminous dead vines, looking like monsters in a children's book. There has been so much rain, that great pools cover the trail here and there so that I tramp through the woods. My feet are soaked.
At night from the Lighthouse Keeper's cabin, we can see the light of the Lighthouse, replaced since last year.
I sleep the sleep of the innocent and in the morning walk the beach, gathering sand dollars under a gray sky. breathing the salt air and the fetid, rich scent of pluff mud, the stuff life comes from.
By noon, the sun can be seen again. The sky is blue with striated white clouds.
Spring is going to come soon, I hope.
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