Island Gems

By Judi McLeod —— Bio and Archives November 16, 2010

Comments | Print This | Subscribe | Email Us

On my coffee table is a perfect sand dollar brought home from my favourite place on Earth, Topsail Beach, North Carolina. “Our town is a quiet beach community located at the southern tip of Topsail Island,” is how townspeople describe their hometown on the Internet. “Two other towns, Surf City and North Topsail Beach, occupy the rest of the island.” With utter respect for the word, I call Topsail a “village”, a village whose backyard is the mighty and majestic Atlantic Ocean.

In a return trip to Topsail in the summer of 2009, we stopped to stock up at the IGA in nearby Surf City before heading to our rented Topsail rented beach house. While I waited in the car with pooch, Kiko, a scenario, that was to become an indelible memory, played out before my very eyes. A flustered female driver having a difficult time trying to park her vehicle in the last available parking spot, was helped by three marines from neighbouring Camp Lejeune. Directions gently given, they bowed to the grateful lady as she passed by them to go into the supermarket--Cody Aliceas grown up! We returned to Topsail via Tignish, P.E.I., a fishing community located in western Prince County, about 50 miles NW of the City of Summerside. I call Tignish, where my maternal relatives live, a “village”, and was happy to see on the Internet that Tignish is considered by the government to be a “village”. Like Topsail, the ocean is the backyard in Tignish and part of my delight in knowing both, is that places like that still exist in a no-time-for-contemplation busy world. Thank God for villages!