Life on a 2-by-4

Apropos of my small-world post, I stumbled on this Space Station's Eye view of our little island while I was web-surfing -- and dang, isn't it pretty from way up there?

That highly-canalled part off to the right is Stock Island, connected to Key West by the euphonious Cow Key Bridge. (Cow, stock, livestock: Get the historical thread?) The long arm rising to the top of the picture is Fleming Key; the smaller one to the right of Fleming is Dredger's; both are Navy. You can see the straight-line dredge cuts.

The offshore dot at 10 o'clock used to be naval, a key descriptively called Tank, but developers applied a ton of lipstick, changed its name to Sunset and made it a very high-class hook for arrivistes.

But our little patch of rock -- just 2 miles by 4 -- is its own quirky mix, live-and-let-living with every stripe of any rainbow ever imagined, rich, poor, in between and who cares.

How did I get here, and what took me so long?