A winter beach is just the thing for soothing the shock of the new
By Serena Kenyon Brown
Here we are in February. It has been one shipping container, seven months, 3,843 miles and 88,632 still-unpacked boxes since the Sandhills of North Carolina.
It is 2 o’clock in the afternoon. The dogs, who normally eat at about 4 o’clock, have climbed into my lap as I sit down to write in order to remind me of their dinner time every minute for the next two hours. They are not lapdog sized and they are inconvenient to work around. Please forgive any resulting errors.
They’ve been somewhat unhinged, the dogs, since we left the pine-scented breezes of Moore County for the salty air of England’s south coast last summer. They’ve never much liked suitcases, and the rearrangement of our entire household on May Street into plastic boxes was a bridge too far. Or so they thought until they were driven to Atlanta, bundled into crates and wheeled onto an aeroplane bound for Heathrow.
As we took our seats on the same plane we asked the air hostess if she would tell the captain that there were dogs on board, so that the hold could be kept at a reasonable temperature.
“Yes,” replied the stewardess, with all the tact of one blissfully unaware of how it feels to have put a pet on a trans-Atlantic flight, “We know. We can hear them. One’s barking, the other’s howling.”
Oh.
It was rather a long journey.
Have you ever had a dream where everything’s completely normal but for one thing that’s starkly out of place? That’s how it felt when the dogs joined us at our friends’ house in London. And there they were again, popping up unexpectedly at my parents’ house, in the back of our old car, which had been mothballed in a barn for nearly five years, as we set out for our new home. (Shortly before the car broke down and we had to be towed the remaining 140 miles. Not quite the first impression we had hoped to make as we rolled in at 10 o’clock at night on the back of a tow truck like the Beverly Hillbillies.)
Our current residence, a red brick villa of elegant Georgian proportions, is resolutely bearing the indignity of having been reduced to a confluence. Here it’s not just the spaniels’ presence that is jolting. It’s everything. Southern family life meets big city youth meets classical art school. Paintings are jostling for space with bicycles and laundry baskets, resting three deep against desks overflowing with anatomical studies and much-put-off paperwork.
A grill that looks like Stephenson’s Rocket dominates the English garden. The red toddler car is cheek by jowl with a Victorian kitchen table piled high with wine bottles, silk peonies, board games, teapots and Ordnance Survey maps, all crowned by a set of red deer antlers and overseen by an effigy of Dewi Sri, the Balinese goddess of rice and home, who is looking very stern in the face of such domestic disharmony.
We have learnt that we are in possession of a vast library of much splashed and scribbled-in cookery books and another of tomes on art history. The downstairs loo is stuffed to the gunwales with fishing tackle. There’s a 1950s Power Trac in what was once the dining room. A bat is hanging off the chandelier.
But for clearing the mind, if not the sitting room, there’s nothing like a bracing winter march along a beach. Known as the Jurassic Coast, 185 million years of history lie in the black and golden cliffs that lour over the beaches here. Ammonite imprints stand out clearly in the rocks. Ten minutes of searching will yield a handful of fossils. We’ve found veins of wood and sea creatures galore, even a very happy clam.
The dogs and I walked along the bay this morning. As often happens, the wind dropped once we reached the shelter of the cliffs. The waves tipped gently onto the shore and retreated with a gravelly ssshhhhhhh. The sun seared through the bitter cold and sent long shadows dancing behind us. Herring gulls soared and socialised. Or perhaps they were pterodactyls.
Back in the States the spaniels would scent deer and flush wild turkeys. Now they’re startling seagulls and turning up Plesiosaurs. Quite an adjustment, and it feels like it’s taking a long time. But on a bright winter’s morning, when the stick the dogs are tussling over is 140 million years old, the turnover of a season or two fits perfectly into perspective. PS
Serena Kenyon Brown is missing the PineStraw magazine deadline milkshakes. Even in the winter.
