At Ocracoke I like to go for walks, discovering roads and paths I hadn't been down or had just plumb forgotten. Yesterday I wandered down a road I hadn't been down in years. As it wound around, it delivered me to a view of a gray, cedar shingled house that rose out of the marsh grass and faced toward the Pamlico Sound. The way it sat on the hill, the house looked exposed, a little forlorn. The more I stood there taking in the whole landscape, the more I felt like I’d wandered into an Andrew Wyeth painting, with its ache and loneliness and its spare beauty.