What follows here are just my thoughts and words. No fact checking, no spell checking, no promises of great insight or good grammar. Just me dumping the words in my head to words on the screen. Bear with me... sometimes it's a bumpy ride.

Sunday, April 13, 2014

From the Land of There and then Not There...

The longer we are here, the more it is revealed to me that this is the Land of There and Then Not There.  Perhaps a bit like this blog...

Trade winds are here one day, blowing like a gale, showering our lanai with abundant and somewhat bothersome Monkeypod leaves.  Then the sun sets and the winds calm to but a breath of movement.  And the beaches shift and change with the tides and storm surges.  One day there's a wide swathe of delicious sand on which to romp and play.  Next time, it's reduced to a tiny ribbon while the surf pounds higher than you've ever seen it before.


There are a gaggle of tourists strolling the sidewalks in their not-nearly-enough-clothing for civilized society.  Yes, this is a beach town, but come on.  Fellas - put your shirts back on.  And ladies, barely clad bodies are for the beach, not the streets.  Oh well, what's to be done?  But then comes a time when there's no more line at the restaurants, and its easier to get a table at the bar for happy hour.  And suddenly the beach isn't teeming, Coney Island style, with rim to rock umbrellas and towels and bodies just begging for more sunscreen.

Friends and acquaintances come and go, with surprising regularity.  Snowbirds arrive in late fall, early winter, stay through their season only to depart again come spring.  See you in six months.  It is sometimes hard to keep track of who you can count on to be here from week to month.  The question is often not so much "Do you live here?" but "Do you live here full time?"

Harder still are the newly connected friends who have decided after so many years, it's time to move back to the mainland.  Really?  But wait - we just got here!!   And the happenstance folks you run into here and there, sharing stories of new arrival and what was left behind. Then the questions becomes "How long have you been here?" and "How long do you think you'll stay?"  We recently met some folks (and their dogs) just two months off the boat from Montana.  Michael and I share a small look of surprise and, dare I say, superiority, when the answer to the first question is "About two and half years" (already??).  And we stick steadfastly to our party line in answer to the second:  We are here until we're not.

Oh, and there was our favorite, most delicious, best treat ever - the Mango Sorbet stand that used to set up just outside our favorite beach.  He made the most refreshing, deleriously tasty chocolate sorbet with peanut butter chips, coconut sorbet, and of course, mango.  A trip to the beach was made all the better with the quick stop after to say hi and partake of the treasured sorbet.  Then one day, gone.  Just like that.  Pau.  Where oh where did he go?

And its not just the people and the places that ebb and flow like the tide.  It's even "things."  There is a rule here on the island, if you are shopping and you see something you want - buy it.  It may well not be there tomorrow.  Great deals on the box of popsicles at Costco that could treat an army battalion.  There for several trips, now mysteriously gone forever from the freezer case (so sad, those same popsicles are prohibitively expensive at Safeway).  Or some necessary tool or interesting gadget at a store.  Here today, gone tomorrow.  Christmas wreaths - poof.  Gone by Thanksgiving.

Well, I'm hoping to carry on the theme, and bring back the blog, at least for a while.  You know, until it mysteriously disappears again.  Like that damned mango sorbet.  Sigh......


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