lazy days

It seems fitting to spend our annual week on the Alabama coast working on a skirt from the Alabama Stitch Book. My first foray into hand stitching, and love it. I cut the panels and stenciled them before leaving home. Now I spend lazy days on the back porch stitching around the stenciled designs and cutting out the shapes.

On the horizon, tugs pull barges back and forth. Sometimes they go in circles. We suspect they're skimming for oil.

Until today, the beaches have been clean; the sand white and powdery, the water clear and warm. Today we're getting a film of oil stirred up by the storm brewing in the gulf. Each day we see workers on the beach. They collect early in the morning a couple of miles down West Beach and take off in pairs driving dune buggies up and down the beach, sometimes scouring an area on foot. None of this has kept us from the water.