Tour o' the town

Sat next to southern belle in
white brimmed shore hat and
soft tanned skin,
at coffee shop end of world
double/brewed ice coffee
none Starbucks entity...in fact there's
no room on the island for a franchise
in fact it's all out of house and home
and you're a local
because you gotta be,

                         anyway,
she was sipping latte and
we listened to the rain lazily drone on
outside, the beach of eternity over
the dunes where the cats
play and rush about stray
and like the people belonging
to this out of the way fish hook,
was barren in the corners of my
thoughts, another place entirely
                        sister and brother
played connect four (the board
10x bigger than usual! maybe? it was
big I swear) playing round after round
and like children can, ignoring me
even when they poured pieces directly
onto my shoes laughing, I smiled and laughed
too, and like their child innocence was 
unembarrassed, watched sister 
deliberately miss three winning
turns in a row so her little brother
would win and they were off to other games,
other memories of which I'd 
play no part,


coffee done we checked 
thrift store in back 
of home and bleak old VHS tapes,
kittens for adoption, but too
far to drive'em (imagine 7 hours
or in fact, yea, more like 9 we'd 
never make it) so
we moved on to small shops in garages
little cute art works and family knickknacks 
and wrong turns and each turn led to
ocean or bay so there's no wrong choice
actually,
and in fact route 12 becomes a
ferry at it's southern most
wandering
until it finds land and then
ocean again
in Ocracoke.