Wake up and check the weather. No rain. The sky looks clear. Let’s go. The harbor looks nice; let’s walk from here. Brrr, it’s cold in the shadows! How can it be only 41 degrees (5 Celsius) on a summer day? We should walk in the sun. But if we walk south, we’ll be on the road. Okay, let’s turn around and head for Boiler Bay. Oh, look, that coffee shop is open. Mmmm, marionberry scones.

Following our amazing week on the Oregon Coast, we shared an even amazinger weekend out here. Maybe it was the amazingest even. But now it’s Monday all over again (oops, I mean Tuesday), so this might start to be seen as some kind of routine for us. Wake, walk by the sea, have homemade breakfast (the scone was pre-breakfast dessert), work/write, eat homemade lunch (today it was cold corona beans with fresh chermoula), work/write, make dinner, walk, sleep, repeat. That sounds like a good plan to me, but please keep the rain away.

There is one thing that is not becoming the routine I’d hoped for, and that’s working on the draft of my novel. As important as I might want to find that project, being here with Caroline and being present for the two of us has more significance in the scheme of things. Some photos of how and where we are sharing our time before and after the work day, some memories of those experiences noted, fresh homemade meals (outside of our routine menu), and extra smiles at one another due to our proximity are all taking precedence over my desire to have found an abundance of opportunity to visit great settings for multi-hour writing sessions. At home, Caroline and I are always apart on weekdays, but here in Oregon, we’ve always been connected at the hip, 24/7, as they say. To break with that tradition while here at the seashore would feel counter to every other day we’ve spent out here.

These places on the coast have been experienced by the two of us precisely equally. To disrupt that balance would be a kind of sacrilege to all that is perfect between Caroline and me. As I sit at a dining room table in the house we are borrowing for this excursion, I can look out the window, such as now, when the weather is perfect and the trees are blowing. If I go to the kitchen window and look through some branches and over the leaves, I can catch glimmers of the sea out on the horizon. Nature beckons, but Caroline must tend to her computer and the job obligations she has, and while I know she’d never ask me to suffer on her behalf, there’s something reassuring in knowing that we are fully sharing in our experiences while up in Oregon.

Sometimes, a not-so-great photo must be shared because it’s the best we’ve got. We’d stood on an overlook high over the cove and watched a few seals coming and going in the water while on a more distant shore, maybe a dozen were congregating in the sun under a cliffside covered with no less than hundreds of birds, but if you told me it was thousands, I’d likely have believed you. We both thought the smaller seal had died, so this photograph came about as Caroline took my phone and zoomed in to somewhere around 30x, and we learned that it was apparently asleep.

Then the whole day goes by, and even dinner has already been had before we find ourselves back out in the world where other stuff is happening, and we become part of that parade of things in nature.

To the trained eye it is obvious that we are looking at seals, not driftwood, on the northern end of the Salishan Spit. Those with untrained minds might wonder why we are out here on such a windy day. For my eyes and imagination, I have to wonder why we chose to live in Phoenix, Arizona, though I don’t really, as it’s a simple equation. When where you live is relatively benign, with wide streets, not grand boulevards, strip malls, and enough cinderblock to build 1000 pyramids, that banality exponentiates the charm of everywhere else you go.

It’s possible that as an amateur photographer, I’ve come to rely on the silhouetted image a bit much, but when you are confronted with the glistening, almost blinding reflection of the sun and its silvery scintillations on the surface of the ocean, there’s really no other way to convey how stark and seductive the image is.

We might be exploring some photographic/thematic redundancy here during our stay in Oregon, and while novelty might wear thin for the repeat visitors to this blog, these reminders of how often Caroline was able to fly her kite, how frequently we walked the same stretch of beach or similarities between forest walks will all be powerful recipes for putting smiles on our faces in the years to come.

We walked north along Taft Beach, passed by the Inn at Spanish Head and crossed over to Nelscott Beach. A bit farther up north, the beach is bisected by a small stream not far from where we the other day we had descended the cliffside on a set of stairs that includes all the stairs ever.

For us, seeing this jellyfish on the shore, magnifying the sand below and amplifying the light ahead, makes for an interesting sight. As for the experience of the jellyfish being out of the water and likely either at the end of its life or about to kick sand, I’m guessing things are going poorly for it right now.

June, the host of our June getaway on the Oregon coast, asked that we pay attention to the irises in her front yard and send her a photo of them should they bloom. I didn’t look at them yesterday, with the rain and overcast sky and all, so they might have bloomed then, but it was only today, getting back to the house shortly before 9:00 p.m., that I reminded Caroline that we need to remember to check in on the flowers. She looked over and thought that they might have flowered, and obviously, on closer examination, we found they indeed had entered the state of ultimate beauty.