Last Days at Hunting Island

 The weather is getting warmer each day and the clouds have stayed away. We are grateful the weather is cooperating. It is hard to get out earlier than 11 o’clock each morning. But we will do better. Christmas is hitting us hard and we are doing the best we can. Being away from family and friends is hard. Thinking about Christmas pasts has left us longing and lonely. Seeing other couples and families and all of the Christmas decorations throughout the campground seems to make things worse. The only thing we are able to do is to go out painting. Painting makes you live in the present. You must use all of your faculties to create a decent painting, so you can’t think of the past. You meet people and they don’t know your circumstances, so it’s easy to have a normal conversation. That is one reason we did this trip.

So, painting we did. I went and finished the painting I started yesterday with Christine by my side. We bought a trolley at Walmart to carry all of our gear on the beach, (a stroke of genius) because you can’t park near the beach. The sun goes behind the trees around 3:30, so we packed up and started a new painting on the marsh. We did small ones understanding how fast the light moves at this hour. But we forgot about the “no see me’s”. Torturous little buggers! We persevered and managed to get a good one started. We headed back ad feeling melancholy we cracked open a wine that we had saved for Christmas.

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Christmas morning was filled with tears. Neither of us could control ourselves. This is all so hard! Our lives are so completely different than just a few months ago. Our futures are blank and the prospect of starting over at 60 is daunting. So many people both alive and past have disappeared from our lives. Things that mattered before are meaningless now. I had to empty our dump tank that morning. We bought a portable dump tank so we didn’t have to hitch and unhitch. As I was emptying it the slinky fell off and our &#)@ exploded in my face! Merry Christmas!

After my shower, There was nothing left for us to do except paint, so we headed for a place that seemed appropriate to us….The Boneyard…

We dragged our heavy trolley over a mile down a path and was stunned by the raw beauty of nature’s destruction. It was mesmerizing! How do you chose what to paint? I decided to paint the only tree left standing. It felt appropriate considering how I felt this day. It was a beautiful day and we really enjoyed ourselves. After dragging our stuff all the way to the truck we were spent and had an early night after eating our rice and beans, our Christmas feast!