(Editor’s Note: This essay first appeared in Lowcountry Weekly in September of 2008. It has been edited for republication.)

A couple of mornings ago, the phone rang here at my home office, and despite the unfamiliar number on my caller I.D., I picked up.

Remember the good ol’ days when you just answered the phone? I was feeling nostalgic, I guess. Plus, the call was coming from Los Angeles, and Jeff has family and friends out that way, so I thought maybe, just maybe, the call was legit.

A conversation with Lowcountry Weekly publisher Jeff Evans, my husband and co-star in the upcoming Valentine’s production of “The Diaries of Adam and Eve” by Mark Twain.

Margaret Evans: So, Jeff, do you feel a little weird about promoting our performance right here in our own publication? Doesn’t it seem a little… self-serving? Opportunistic? Vain?

Jeff Evans: No.

The world is new each morning – that is God’s gift, and a man should believe he is reborn each day.

-  Israel Ben Eliezer

 I stood on Fripp Island’s shoreline New Year’s Day to watch the sun rise. Against the backdrop of an incandescent horizon, small waves rolled across a stretch of beach colliding and tumbling, becoming one and then disappearing, leaving behind the sizzling sound water makes as it sifts and sinks in between granules of sand.