Stormy Sunday Thoughts (Hurricane in Outer Banks)
Stormy Sunday Morning
The house creaks in the wind, the kind of sound that makes you wonder if the whole structure is breathing along with the storm. Rain needles against the glass, and somewhere just beyond the dunes the Atlantic is throwing itself onto the bar, relentless and unmoved.
These mornings carry a strange stillness. The roads are empty, the sky low and heavy, and it feels as if the whole island is pausing—waiting for something that never quite arrives.
Everyone says the Outer Banks won’t be here in the future. To me that feels less like prophecy and more like confirmation of what I already know: nothing is forever. This place is a flicker. We are flickers inside it.
I find myself wondering about the people who lived here before mortgages and deadlines, before banks and phone notifications. Their lives weren’t measured by loan terms or escrow accounts. The currency was simpler and sharper: fish in the net, wood for the fire, a roof that could outlast the next blow.
Did they breathe easier than we do, untethered from the weight of bills? Or was their breath just as tight, drawn against the uncertainty of survival itself? Shelter and food were the daily anxieties, not spreadsheets and insurance policies. The game was different, but it was still survival.
That’s the strange paradox of life on this sandbar. Whether your worry is the mortgage payment or the next storm tide, the ocean isn’t listening. The Atlantic does not wait for us, does not care what we need or what we fear.
It just is.
And yet, in that indifference, there is a kind of freedom. A reminder that nothing we build—no cottage, no motel, no seawall, no story—is permanent. The best we can do is breathe deep on stormy mornings like this one, feel the salt in the air, and know that our time here, however brief, is part of the same endless rhythm.
That’s why we’ve poured ourselves into Tower Circle Motel. Not because we believe it will stand forever, but because it deserves to be loved while it’s here—just like the rest of this fragile sandbar. We didn’t build it. We fixed it up, cared for it, and gave it new life so it could keep holding stories a little longer.
Because in the end, legacy here isn’t measured in permanence. It’s measured in presence.
