Things today couldn’t have got off to a better start. Nor was it only the vindication of having arisen before eight o’clock this morning that assured the magnificent perfectly brilliant day wasn’t already half-spent. The purification rather was a massage of my aching feet and rigid lower limbs. I almost hesitate to mention the euphoria that arose because its sounds so common and uncommon in the same breath. Little do we estimate the abuse our stilts and pads take every living day. They are without a doubt the long suffering units of our anatomy. If any other part of our corpus were subject to such perpetual abuse I am quite certain there’d be at least some recognition or evidence of the endurance. But until those quarters in the nether reaches are treated to the theurgy of a massage we otherwise live in not-so-blissful ignorance.

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It has to be one of the things we so enjoy about Hilton Head Island that it has acquired a familial tone to it.  We’re about as well acquainted as one may expect to be with our estate agent (whom we have known for well over a decade and whom we find to be singularly helpful and completely trustworthy); we’ve developed neighbourhood familiarity at a local beanery; we know our way about our preferred areas of the island without having to rely upon GPS; we recognize the inevitable changes and improvements (as well as confessing the aging of both ourselves and certain of our environment); and, most significantly we rejoice in being back, being home among steady and stimulating personalities and soul-stirring landscape.

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Sir James Murray’s estimate that the dictionary would be completed by 1891 proved to be wildly optimistic; it was not until 1928, well after his death, that final volume was published. The last printed edition of the OED was published in twenty volumes in 1989 and is now only available to subscribers electronically, a medium which allows for almost instantaneous updates and amendments.

Citations and definitions of each word were laboriously transferred on to slips of paper, around three tons worth by his death, from which they were eventually distilled into entries for the dictionary. To speed the process up Murray sent an Appeal for Readers around the Anglophone world asking for volunteers to supply him with suitable quotations illustrating how various English words were used over the centuries. Respondents were asked to avoid concordances of the Bible, Shakespeare, and Edmund Burke as they had already been trawled through. One of the most prolific postal contributors was William Chester Minor, a murderer staying at Her Majesty’s pleasure at Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane, who sent in over 12,000 citations.

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Hilton Head Island is part of the Lowcountry region in the U.S. state of South Carolina. It’s known for Atlantic Ocean beaches and golf courses. The Harbour Town Lighthouse and Museum marks the southwest tip. The Coastal Discovery Museum features heritage buildings, trees and themed gardens. Between the island and mainland, the Pinckney Island National Wildlife Refuge salt marsh hosts deer, alligators and birds.

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I can think of no greater compliment to currency than to speak dismissively of it as just another day. Indeed by way of less literary interpretation it is in my experience not uncommon that, no matter where on earth one happens to be at the moment, eventually being there is favourably expressed as just another day (but always with the added ingredient that the very mundanity of the observation is what preserves its appeal). Human nature is thus at its very best terribly accommodating. The wordly stimulus is the not insignificant insinuation that, though short of spiritual elevation, the immediate circumstance is heartening, perhaps even surmounting physical restriction or evolution. All told just another day is expressive of contentment. I’m having one of those days, just another day.

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We at last made it to a car wash.  The residents of Hilton Head Island are well known for their adherence to vehicular maintenance. This is a social prejudice nurtured by a national history of car worship, an apostasy which I admit to embracing. Withdrawal from the perils of winter certainly helps to promote the standards of automotive cleanliness and cosmetics. Yesterday we saw a lumbering Rolls Royce wending about a traffic circle on Lighthouse Road near Harbour Town golf links.

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January 29, 2024

Apartment 1917
South Beach Club
Hilton Head Island, SC

Dear Debora,

Thank-you for your email, kind of you to have written. As you mentioned, the initial stage of our drive here from home was threatened by freezing rain but we escaped the region without consequence other than an exceedingly filthy car. And, as you also quipped, the acquisition of a new painting was sternly met with fleeting disapproval from His Lordship (though naturally in the end he succumbed to both the profligacy and the superfluity). I look forward to sharing a view of it with you upon our return in March. By coincidence the owners (the Schwartz family) of our rental apartment here have demonstrably an unqualified preference for the collection of art, many and varied renditions of which appear throughout the spacious and superbly well-appointed 3-bedroom unit.

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Meeting people for the first time is a lesson in both chemistry and society.  The composition of the community is scientifically assured to engender limitless ingredients having a bearing upon the convention.

Chemistry
the branch of science that deals with the identification of the substances of which matter is composed; the investigation of their properties and the ways in which they interact, combine, and change; and the use of these processes to form new substances;
the complex emotional or psychological interaction between two people

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The Northwesterly gusts through the open patio door off the master bedroom this morning revived whatever trace of somnolence remained after our 4-day journey here and a fulfilling meal late yesterday afternoon at the Salty Dog in nearby South Beach.

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Lumberton, NC, Harrisonburg, VA and Binghamton, NY are but dust, rain and sleet in our rearview mirror. Around noon today the palmetto ferns began ornamenting the highway as we neared Hilton Head Island. We took another sharp left turn eastward in the direction of the North Atlantic Ocean, escaping Interstate 95 as though assuaging a scar with an anodyne. The land widened upon the sea marshes, expanding the horizon in the endless western sky above the vast salt water inlet. A launch motored inland from the sea. We were back. Years of memories suddenly percolated from the depths. Together we proclaimed, “There! Remember that!”. Or pointed to a landmark we recalled with gusto. Or merely allowed the serum of nostalgia to infuse our veins and settle our minds.

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