Like most people, I love a good vacation- a day in the sun, a step back into history, or an adventure into nature. Luckily for me, there’s one place that can give all of those things at once: the Outer Banks. The lovely Outer Banks is a 200 mile stretch of barrier islands off the coast of North Carolina, and it has just about anything you could wish for. Miles of beach access, boardwalks and shops, lighthouses, and even wild horses. It is a place that you only have to visit once to know that you’ll never want to leave again. It’s my home away from home.
Of all the times I’ve come to the OBX, Corolla specifically, I find the most peace near the ocean. Each time I walk from my house to the Corolla Light pool deck I can smell the salty air. From the top of the pier I watch the ebb and flow of the tide as it washes over the sand. I love walking down to the beach and listening to the sound of children laughing and families playing together. But my favorite part of going to the beach has to be the seashells. I love picking them up and holding them in my hands. Just like each person on the beach is different each seashell is unique. It has its own pattern, its own shape, its own color.
I pick up a chipped orange shell close to the water and think. Those little shells once had lives of their own. They were alive under the sea, deep into places we could only imagine. Maybe this one originally was home to a hermit crab off the coast of South Africa. Maybe the oyster shell next to it once made the most beautiful pearls under the waves near Morocco. These shells spent their whole existence somewhere in the deep only to land above the water and in the hands of a curious traveler, like me.
The OBX is like a magnet. When the first English settlers came to the continent they made their first home here on Roanoke Island. Just like those settlers and the seashells have been drawn to the Outer Banks, so have my family and I. We are brought back year after year to the familiarity of our home away from home.
With each tide more seashells are brought in just like with each new week at the Outer Banks new families are brought in to make new memories; and what a perfect place to make memories. The sound of the ocean is like an echo of all the memories from the past; the rich history that the Outer Banks holds.
And just like that, the voices of the families around me snap me back to reality. My fingers close around the orange shell in my hand and I look to see a little boy giggling as the waves nearly knock him down. These shells could’ve landed anywhere in the world, but they ended up in the Outer Banks, with me; and I can’t help thinking that maybe it was fate that brought us here together. But fate or not, I wouldn’t want to have landed anywhere else.
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