Archive Fever: Writing and thinking with oceans, memory, and attention.

  There’s something strangely familiar and magical about the eye of a hurricane—how it can be so quiet and full of repose while everything around it breaks. Seemingly a paradox, but more of a metaphysical dialectic—the center of the storm being still and pausing time for a moment-- like so many of nature’s sublime offerings fr om solar eclipse quietude to surreal sweeping devastation of a tsunami. Hurricanes feel unique in the ability to encompass an entire catalog of attributes that touch each aspect of human awe. The eye, especially, as it offers us awe quite like the stillness that feels briefly a lot like death. Or maybe like being born. My grandmother died just after sunrise on August 26, 2011, in Wilmington, North Carolina, as Hurricane Irene reached her peak just offshore. A Category 3 system, Irene spun her spiral right past the coast I’d grown up on. It wasn’t the most powerful or devastating hurricane I, or anyone had seen...

Today is my son's 17th birthday. I’m watching him swim deliberately, doggedly. He, as always, is swimming his heart out. We are at a swim meet in Greensboro, North Carolina. Greensboro Aquatic Center. Lane 3. The same pool he’s raced in countless times. The same town my mom once called home—briefly and begrudgingly—when she attended what was then the Woman’s College of UNC. She was a Wilmington girl. A coastal soul just like me who missed the ocean every day she spent inland. Greensboro never really clicked for her, and I have to admit, I’ve inherited that discomfort. I used to think I hated this place. I still don’t love it. But it's complicated—because every time I come here, I remember things. I learn things. My mom used to talk about how proud she was to go to the Woman’s College—at the time ranked just behind Vassar. She loved what it stood for: women pushing forward, making space for each other. But she was also fuming when the college went coed (years after she graduate...