I end up doing some strange things. One of them is walking our cat on our deck. The cat used to be an indoor/outdoor cat, but after an injury a few years ago we decided to keep him inside. He never really asked to go back out so it was easy.
Still he likes a taste of the out of doors. At our Roanoke, Va. home we have a screen porch that he enjoys greatly. Down on the Carolina Coast we have a deck but it has no screens and has stairs to the ground.
It is a wonderful deck, but there is no way to contain the cat. Still he has become very fond of spending some time out there smelling he breeze. The cat has even taken to following me upstairs to my office and has learned to beg to go outside.
Mostly it works fine, I sit and watch the scene pictured in the post. It is not very tough duty. Sometimes I might even have an Anchor Steam beer if I am lucky. It occurred to me recently that with a few exceptions the picture I took could easily be of Canada.
The Pine trees remind me of spruce trees. The green grass looks like Nova Scotia. The water could be almost anywhere. The Palm trees are another matter.
Still if you can ignore the heat, you can almost imagine that you are in Nova Scotia. I have never been comfortable where there is no view to excite my soul. Even back in the seventies when just out of college, I was privileged to live on the shores of the Bay Fundy. It was a magic time in an extraordinary place.
After Nova Scotia we moved to New Brunswick where our farmhouse set on a ridge twenty miles north of Fredericton, New Brunswick. It was also a beautiful view of a small farming community or a disappearing way of life depending on your perspective.
When we left the farm in 1984 to work for Apple Computer, we moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia and had a wonder view of the harbor from our bedroom. My office was on the sixteenth floor of the Toronto Dominion building on Barrington Street. It had floor to ceiling glass and allowed me to watch the harbor all the time.
After we left Canada in 1987, we tried Columbia, Maryland, but there was no view. We didn't even last two years.
Then we lived for many years in the foothills of Twelve O'Clock Knob Mountain in Roanoke, VA where the view provided me with many sunrises that I have posted on the web at my Sobotta.org site.
It was a great place, and I didn't have to walk the cat.
Still coastal North Carolina provides some fantastic scenery and is a place where you don't have to worry about snow and ice. We walk the beaches twelve months out of the year and only wear bluejeans for a couple of them.
If you look at this high definition movie that I just did during my last cat walk, it is pretty easy to tell the trees are not Canadian, but the view still takes me back to my Nova Scotia days.
Here is what it looks like on the beach at Emerald Isle. Here is a travel guide to our Emerald Isle which is on this side of the Atlantic. Fall is the best time to visit, the crowds are gone and the beach is still spectacular with warm water that Canadians can only dream of finding in Canada.
