Beach, Music, and Home

Rachel and I drove to Virginia for her biannual Sandbridge Hammered Dulcimer Week. For those outside the HD world, this is the place where a very particular people dispel their excessive enthusiasm for the instrument by playing together 33.2 hours a day times 5.

This is also the place where my red-headed child drags me out of bed in the early mornings for walks on the beach so she can obsessively search for sea glass, interesting shells and half-dead or dead creatures that she carefully carries back to the water hoping to save.

She occasionally makes it back to our room just before supper and plays a song for me on her back up hammered dulcimer in our room. (Because she hauled TWO hds to Virginia and she is not tired of making music).

After one late night jam, she returns to our room, gets ready for bed and in her southern voice says, “I’m gonna spread out like a MAAN. And crack open a BEER.” Then she takes a swig of her “beer” (Coke), swishes it in her mouth and gets choked.

It is a good week. But a long one away from home.