Topsail Island, Twenty-Plus Years Later…..

The old bridge is gone, and a soaring new one has replaced it. And that’s pretty much true for everything I used to know here. I grew up coming to Topsail Island/Surf City and have some wonderful memories of high school weekends here after proms or graduation. But it’s been more than twenty years since I’ve visited. After Hurricanes Bertha and Fran did so much damage to the island in the 1990s, I didn’t visit, and then moved from my childhood home and ended up going to other beaches if that was the vacation destination. There are only a couple of places that look exactly the same as I remember. Bert’s Surf Shop is still its old, yellow, beaconing self. The grocery store that literally just says “Supermarket” across the store front is still there and the same. There is an old putt-putt place that is worn, weathered, familiar, and comfortable. But not much else. I visited a popular restaurant, an old favorite that serves Italian food/pizza, but found that it tasted like disappointment. Nothing like what I remembered from those teenage visits. But I know that memory can be a faulty thing, and it probably was really the people and the times that made the pizza taste so good back then. (The service was amazing, by the way, so not an insult to the restaurant by any means.) Walking down the beach and looking at all the amazing beautiful structures that have been built in the last twenty years has been fun. I love to look at houses and imagine the lives that are lived within the walls. And the beach is supposed to be such a happy place that it’s easy to imagine good stories. I’ve loved walking down the beach and watching parents build castles or look for shark’s teeth or hermit crabs with their little ones. I’ve loved having the sun on my skin, tempered by the cooling breeze coming off the water. I’ve loved spending time with the folks I’ve been with down here. Nostalgia and middle age are hitting me hard. Can you tell? It’s been good to be back. To see that though most things change, a few do stay the same. On the outside, anyway.