Sailing away

This is the Wreckers' Race on Sunday -- which we missed. While they were sailing north, we were driving up the Keys, and I got a bit misty as I passed Stock Island for the first time in six months or so and got farther from Southernmost with every mile marker.

Our last days before the trip were not idyllic -- both water heaters finally decided to fail, and the plumber promised to come both Friday and Saturday, but canceled each time. But no matter.

This morning we're in Gainesville, with probably the last fast web connection I'll have in a good, long time, so we'll just have to see how well this thing works from Holly Hill, where the temperature as I write is 48.

Shiver me timbers indeed.

Let there be light (switches)

Two reasons for my spotty posting: blues, because we're getting ready to head north for a while; and busyness, because we're getting ready to head north for a while.

One full day, for example, went to getting the hurricane door on the laundry fixed. Turns out it was installed wrong, and a misplaced screw doomed the motor, which meant the replacement was free, though lengthy.

I'm still waiting for the replacement water heater, which means we're showering upstairs.

And then the garden. . . .

Robert's been doing spring fertilizing, and I'm pruning things back so they won't be out of control in the month or two we'll be away (we're planning on hopping down during the summer when we can).

And then the computer controller for the lights, which I'd like to fire at odd times while we're gone, as a little deterrent to disturbance. I've been wrestling with it for weeks, and only today found the right button to get the core application to fix itself and start working. So voila, the porch light now goes on at 20 minutes after sunset, plus or minus 15 minutes, and turns off sometime around midnight.

I'll fool around with regular lighting scenarios -- adjusting the spot on the Winnie Godfrey's tulip at top left, for example -- when I have more time.

Setting it straight

There's been a bit of talk lately about our photogenic bachelor governor having a shot at the GOP's veep slot.

That pesky whispering about his singleness keeps coming up, though, which may be one reason they released this picture of him and the woman he introduced as "my girlfriend" at a Governor's Mansion reception.

Safe at last

Eleven years ago, the state Department of Environ- mental Control declared that the Australian pines at Ft. Zach would have to go -- non-native species, invasive, feh.

Hundreds who love the shade, the sound of the sea breeze through the trees and esthetics in general rose up, organized, nagged, complained and nettled.

Last year, the state started cutting, and the caterwauling stepped up loud enough to drown out the chain saws.

And this week, finally, the state agreed that the pines could stay.

That swishing you hear is the laughter of trees.

Another 'Mission Accomplished'

From Reuters, April 20, 2007:

U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said on Friday the housing market correction appears to be at or near its bottom and that troubles in the subprime mortgage market will not likely spread throughout the economy.

"We've clearly had a big correction in the housing market. Retail housing was growing for some time at a level that was not sustainable," Paulson said in a speech to The Committee of 100, a business group in New York promoting better Chinese relations.

"I don't see (subprime mortgage market troubles) imposing a serious problem. I think it's going to be largely contained," he added.

Muy tropicál

Things like to grow a lot here.

Yesterday I cut the night- blooming hibiscus back at least a foot, to let its neighbors get light under and around it, and today it shouted back with 3 inches of "So there!"

And then there is the ficus ripens, the little creeping fig we want to coat the sides of our front steps.

It's covering the ground on either side, all right -- so much so that I go in every week or so and keep it from choking out everything there. But it's also deployed across the bottom step.

Footfalls keep it in line so far. But I'm fascinated by the regularity of its attempts. (Not to mention those of the volunteer ferns in the brick walkway.)

Monsters among us

This fine creature, sitting in the mangrove pond at North Roosevelt and Martí, is part of this year's Sculpture Key West, which puts new works from artists near and far at Fort Zach, the West Martello and other locations around town.

We scoped out the Martello pieces at Harrell and Barry's end-of-season party there, and enjoyed them as ever. This offsite installation, named "_┌" in an all-too-cute smiley way, is not half the animal of last year's tremendous "Trojan Duck," a giant wooden mallard on wheels that sat at the East Martello for many happy months.

Robert would naturally like to bring the monster to the lake at Holly Hill but, dear lad, he has the sense to read our market positions correctly and realizes that we would do well to fund a newt.

Other visitors in town, however, would be welcome under no circumstances whatsoever.

I refer to spring breakers, who have been either refused admission at or tossed out of most of the hotels and guest houses on or near our street. A batch of 6 lads, who became 8, and then 12, and then 16, and so on, got the boot from the pink house across the street yesterday.

They were replaced by 6 female breakers, who travel in flocks, and became louder than the 16 males because they all chatter at once, as opposed to staggering off in small beer-soaked subgroups whose lungs only power up here when the bars close a block away at 4 a.m. (Besides, the pecs are better on the males this year.) One was sleeping on our driveway two nights ago, and moved very quickly for such a large person when I shone a cop-grade flashlight in his face.

And then there are this weekend's crowds: As I went out to get some new bowls from Grace, our personal potter, and pick up the Keysmobile after an oil change, the clots of people staggering up and down Duval in green T-shirts and green hats and green beads and green beer sloshing on the sidewalk reminded me of why I was so glad to move from the apartment over the Irish bar on Halsted street lo those many years ago.

Two in the bush

Actually, it's now three, but that one's not in the picture.

These are white birds of paradise, out at the front fence, and I'm awfully happy the big plants are so eager to bloom.

Since they went in last June, they've grown an extra couple of feet, and we've had seven or eight blossoms, all about a foot long and not terribly visible from the street but gorgeous from the porch.

Old standards

It was Robert's birthday, so of course we were at Alice's, and of course he had the lettuce wedgie with blue cheese and the coconut shrimp and bread pudding (with decoration), and of course I had duck shu mai and yellowtail, and of course we had Moscato after-dinners.

And of course we went to La Te Da -- where we of course expected to find Debra and Patrick, whom we'd seen a few days before at Harrell and Barry's party at the Martello, but Bobby Nesbitt, who of course was at the H&B party, too, was playing and of course we enjoyed it.

For what the bell tolls

Yet another reason I think Key West is like no other place on Earth:

On our way up Duval from a lawyer's appoint- ment yesterday, we happened to pass St. Paul's at the stroke of noon, and I had to grin.

It was the first time I'd ever heard "Give My Regards to Broadway" played on a carillon.

Another shabby day in Paradise

No one here would say "shabby," but for me it's the same idea Mr. Wright had for Falling Water:

Go outside your house to see where your house is. The intention is what the deal is about.

If you live here, that might mean going to the beach, with the guitar guy in the background doing John Lennon's greatest hits, so you can watch the big ball drop into the palapa at the Casa Marina.

This time of year, there are all sorts of tourists climbing across the barricades on the old Dick Dock, still being repaired after Wilma; but if they fall in the gulls and pelicans will make the alarm.

Screened porch

So there I've been, nursing my thumb (not totally in the thumb-
sucking phase, but almost) on the porch.

And it has been in the 80s and 90s here, which makes me wonder even more about climate change, and about the heat of the ocean.

But back to the topic. It has been difficult, with the bandage and all, to turn pages on books, and specifically to type. But not to observe from my corner of the porch, and to note that the pink mussaenda, to the left of the column, and the night-blooming jasmine, to the right, have all but obscured the view of the street toward me.

Their little view-slits make me think of the Arabic porches of Seville, woodcuts so artful that the harem members above could watch the street below without being observed.

And so I sit, veiled, and watch.

Thumbs

If you look in from the street gate, this is what you see.

Behind it is our outdoor shower, which is why the green wall is crucial, and why I'm so happy it's taken off so dramatically.

That's my green-thumb side.

My red thumb emerged while I was slicing onions for shepherd's pie, quickly becoming a blue thumb when I wrapped it in painter's tape so I could keep on cooking.

Typing is another matter. I'll be back when it's better.

Hasta luego

When Castro gets a cold, we sneeze, so there was a great a-choo around town when he turned over power to Raúl.

In the end it meant nothing immediate, of course. But I still know that someday we will be the gateway to Cuba by boat. (We were that reverse gateway Saturday morning, when 24 Cubans came ashore at Smathers Beach on a handmade craft powered by an old Mercedes diesel, the indigenous lust for freedom being what it is. Since they met the "dry foot" test, having actually made it to shore, they're now our fellow Americans. Bienvenidos.)

This burnt-out wall on Petronia, and the fancy deck behind it, always remind me of the potential that lies ahead.

Give me the glow

Pardon my hiatus, but Robert got back over the week- end, and things got busy fast. My time's not quite my own when he's here.

He loves being out and about, so there was Sunday brunch with a Tennessee mash-up: his old prom date and her husband, and their childhood friend Lulie (baptized Lula Bell, I swear) and her husband, now from big-D Dallas, and her parents.

And then the Oscar party at Steve and Paul's house, where I actually got to see at least five minutes of the Oscars, but then sat through an hour of home movies of painfully bad lip-synch drag.

And then cocktails before dinner here the next night for the same bunch, except the guests didn't go to dinner and I kept feeling as if I had to keep bringing out food.

And then the share-dish at Dwight's, because his mother and stepfather and uncle are leaving tomorrow and wanted to see us again, and the dozen and a half other people who showed up.

These are all nice folks, mind you, even the woman who was all too happy to display nether piercings that remind me why some things used to be called private parts, and the ones who ask again and again how various parts of my own anatomy are sized. All things being equal I'd rather be at home on the deck.

This is how it looks with the garden lights we finally got installed. Soft-glowing, quite private, serene. I just want to lock the door.

Breezin'

When the winds pick up -- and they've picked way up lately -- the Balinese flags we found in Islamorada have a snapping good time.

But all of them, including the red one around the corner to the left, are starting to show signs of stress. The bamboo poles are wearing through the fabric, which isn't visible from the street, or much from the deck, but obvious from the upstairs shower.

We'll probably have to wrestle them down and see if smoothing the tip with something like duct tape can prevent further damage.

When we first fell in love with flags like this, in Bali, we brought the flags home but had to fashion poles out of PVC for our deck in Wisconsin.

And speaking of deck: Notice the silver buttonwoods growing 4 or 5 feet over the fence? When they went in last summer, they were a foot below the top.

It's a riot out there

Every morning I primp -- not myself, heaven knows, but the face the house gives to the street.

Pluck yesterday's hibiscus, now shriveled (this morning there were 15). Pull fallen sapodilla leaves out of the plumbago. Trim seed pods from the yellow elder. Gather aralia leaves and stems that have dropped into the ferns. Check the dwarf plumeria for rust. Snip errant stems from the night jasmine. Saw off dying palm fronds or emerging seed pods. Cull browning foliage from the oleander and the Clarks' weird and wonderful tropicals behind them. Nip here, tuck there. . . .

Keeping up appearances takes all of about 15 minutes, during which my coffee has had a chance to cool to less than scalding and the detritus has gone into a paper bag on the corner of the porch, to be composted, and after which the sun is welcome to emerge in earnest to light up the stage set.

At least once a day I see people stop and take a picture. (My little zen office is on the floor of the loft, looking out the high window, so I see them and they don't see me.) If I'm on the porch, they usually say a nice word about the house, or ask the name of those blue things (they're the plumbagos) or just give a thumbs-up and a wave and grin and go on their way.

I think the plants must be soaking up the love.

There goes the neighborhood

So now the city, in the guise of the Bight Board, which owns the property around the old seaport, is saying that Schooner Wharf may have to be demolished and built to FEMA standards.

This has nothing to do, cough, cough, with the erection of luxury condos, cookie-cuttered and Disneyfied and uglified as the new "Harbor Walk" across the street. Not that those folks might not want to look out at ordinary people having one hell of a good time.

Oh, no. The city, as the property owner, has to make sure it's all safe, and meets FEMA standards (as if anyone is going to seek shelter by boogying down to the water's edge to hear Caffeine Carl get his riffs off during a Cat 4?; as if FEMA and its great track record ought to move in formaldehyde trailers to make it all better?).

At least there is this. The Wharf rightfully advertises itself as "a last little piece of Old Key West." And the Bight Board, to its credit, recognizes that one factor it needs to preserve is "funkiness." (At its best, the Wharf makes Blue Heaven look like a sterile lab.)

How you adequately specify that in a request for proposals is beyond me. But what's not beyond me is that if the Wharf goes, that last little piece of Old Key West goes, too.

Thank you so much, Mayor McPherson.

Chartreuseter

There is only so much time that you can spend watching your Conch Republic flag billowing in the breeze, wrapping itself lazily around the pole and wondering if it will unwrap itself, and magically it does, until you realize it might be a good day for errands, with Robert in Sarasota for a big bridge tournament, and there's a nice clear sky after the overnight storm, and it's in the low 80s.

So there was the driver's license office (renew the registration on the Keysmobile and get the new stickers for the plate, now two years at a clip, and get a new license that doesn't require that I wear glasses, thanks to the cararact fixes); then to KMart for some tumblers (after the Cleveland Quartet all wanted glass and left me with plastic, which I hate, Robert finally agreed that four in the cabinet didn't cut it); then to Publix for some staples; then to the library to turn two books in and take two out (with the clerk saying rather pointedly as she scanned my Grishams in, "Looks as if we finally need a break from literature, don't we?"); and to Fausto's for a precious little piece of veal and a bottle of marsala (quarter of a cup for the veal, and a half or so for the cook), a cold-case packet of gratinéed potatoes from Switzerland that have to be tasted to be believed, and some rainwater madeira for a rainy day (good lord, is malmsey next?), I was heading home when. . . .

Yes, that green-feathered rooster.

I have grown accustomed to some serious plumage here, including the speckled fella who gave flurrious challenge to our glorious orange-and-auburn George (in the right corner) to cock-of-the-walk space on our street a few days ago.

But: green?

Yes. A vigorous yes.

And this to answer sweet bam, my Chicago anchor, who asked in a comment the other day whether Hemingway's cats still roamed here. Or was it his roosters?

To set the record somewhat straight: His descendants say he had no cats, though his tourist-attraction house two blocks from us (which our architect rehabbed, by the way) has a collection of polydactyls that they trumpet as original -- and has brought them grief from animal activists, who have got them in trouble with the feds by claiming that they operate as a zoo. Give me a break.

And in the rooster roster, Papa was apparently a big fan of cockfights (which continue here in clandestine fashion to this day, according to my barber, Armando, whom I'm overdue in seeing). And our gypsy chickens, proliferating by leaps and bounds, blossom in colors I've not dreamed of, though obviously the Parisiennes did when they specified "coq" for its iridescent sheen.

A good day, though that's true of any day with a flapping flag and veal marsala with some Swiss potatoes.

They're in season

Tourist time is peaking, and parking is tightening, but not thanks to these guys, here from Canada for the big regatta (along with Denmark's crown prince and a few thousand others from a dozen other countries).

The Vancouver boys, who stayed across the street, did all their business by bike and moped, so the only other vehicle they left on the street was a very heavy-duty pickup they'd used to pull their sailboat almost 3,600 miles.

In season here, you get used to the "Hey! I've got a horn!" beeps, echoed by others who have recently discovered their own buttons. Charming at first, they begin to grate after the 20th or 50th or 100th in a day. And of course they're a huge hazard: heedless of danger (this is paradise, after all; what could happen?), clueless about safe operation of an unfamiliar vehicle in strange territory, and often tipsy -- but in those factors they are identical to other tourists in cars or on foot. Here, you drive at their own risk.

But at least they're not roaring in on 90-decibel Harleys. Our friend Sullins contends, along with a letter-writer in the Citizen this week, that it might be nice if the cops actually enforced existing state laws limiting motorcycle noise to reasonable limits, instead of declaring all bets off.

Go for quality in tourists, he says, not quantity -- and he wants a team with noise-meters at the Cow Key Bridge to turn the offenders back. I say let's put it in Largo and head 'em off at the pass.

If the nihil fits . . .

It was Parmenides whispering in my ear as I looked over at the schefflera Arthur had whacked off back in early December.

Sure enough, the little green umbrellas were proving the species' resilience, and I was wrong to write the stump off.

Ex nihilo nihil fit, the old Eleatic said, "Nothing comes from nothing," and the stump was not nothing.

And as I wandered down the presocratic maze, my toes started tapping: It was the cosmogeny of William Everett Preston, bopping that same message with the joy of fresh green leaves.

A visit from Roy G. Biv

Robert spent a few hours cleaning the chandelier crystal by crystal, and now it's even harder to look at when the sun illuminates it through the high window.

Sir Isaac would have recognized those bands of light painting the room: spectra, hundreds of them.

Let a thousand rainbows bloom.

Boomerang arrow

Maryl, JY, Gary and Muggs were over for drinks Thursday before dinner at Louie's, and I don't remember which one of them associated Valentine's Day with its initials. . . .

Which spun me back those many years to my early days on the editorial page, where I'd been brought in to add a bit of sauce to the ink. And in my bad-boy way, I proposed a ValDay editorial based on VD awareness. Brilliant, they said, so I did my reporting on STD rates, VD hotline numbers, condom use (this was waay before safe-sex campaigns) and even tracked down the head of the board of health, Dr. Eric Oldberg, for a pithy quote.

The good doctor, a society gynecologist, had received his appointment because one of his more prominent patients was Sis Daley, the mayor's wife, and I had to track him down at his home in Lake Forest for the quote. But I got it, put it in the editorial and smiled smugly at my thoroughness and wit.

Which was shot full of arrows the next morning. Dr. Oldberg called, not to congratulate me but to point out that the number I'd printed for the VD hotline was his home number, and Mrs. Oldberg was taking phone calls that started with "I've got this discharge. . . ."

Another paver on the road to hell, but it does get a laugh at a cocktail party.

Lavendoor

Colors always seem so much clearer after a good rain, and when I finally got back on the porch I was reminded just how much the door on Conch Casa, the rental cottage across the street, tickled my Aunt Liz a few weeks back.

It's hard to tell in the sodium-vapor streetlight, but the cottage itself is about the color of Tennessee Williams' favorite drink: well-blended grasshopper.

Brace for foul weather

Despite appear- ances, this is NOT the Bush Recession about to make landfall.

It's yet another relatively rare winter thunderstorm, and a severe one, about to paste us at midday Wednesday.

They started Tuesday, just as two friends from Dalton came through on a cruise, drinks on the deck and brunch. So much for the deck. They continued Tuesday night, when four friends from Cleveland came by for dinner, and the deck awning creaked over our heads before pouring gallons in theatrical cascades all around the table, though not directly on us, thank heaven.

We need to work on our deck karma.

Not in a million years . . .

You can't garden around here without a tree saw -- at least if you want to keep your OCD demon happy -- and I pulled it out the other day to lop a few hundred stringbean-shaped seed pods off our yellow elder to force new blooms.

About two-thirds of the way through the job, I noticed the blade waving wildly: that nut you see at the base had fallen off, lost somewhere in the mulch.

I had visions of trekking out to Home Depot -- it's just across the island, 2 miles at best; but sometimes it seems like the other side of the earth -- wrangling a new saw out of the display, jockeying it across the store to the nut display to find the right size . . . . Because I could never, ever, find the nut under all our plants.

Dispirited at the prospect of all that exertion, I hung up the wobbly saw and got out the clippers to get some low fronds off the licualas flanking the front steps (apparently they're fairly rare and hard to grow -- except they seem to like me). And there, in the mulch below, the shiny little nut gleamed like a diamond on a trash pile.

It was a sign. I got the saw back out, twisted the nut home and took some frond bases and shark-sleek seed pods from the Christmas palms out front.

The gods smile on the OCD-afflicted.

The green wall

In late afternoon, when sun makes reading on the porch hard, I retreat to the wing chair in the den.

Yesterday, looking over my shoulder to the front door, I noticed the wall outside -- a lattice of green, with licualas at the bottom, hibiscus in the middle and the big birds of paradise fanning over all.

And yet again, for about the third time in the day and the millionth in a lifetime, I fell in love with this place.

On not writing

Maybe it's the same thing Samuel Beckett was talking about in 1937:

"It is indeed becoming more difficult, even senseless, for me to write in English. More and more my own language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart to get at the things (or the nothingness) behind it. Grammar and style, to me they seem to have become ass irrelevant as a Victorian bathing suit or the impeturbability of the true gentleman: a mask. . . ."

Or maybe it's winter blahs; my version of Seasonal Affective Disorder persists, I think, even under relatively sunny skies. It's the day length as well as the brightness.

Or maybe it's just writer's block.

Which I will try, try, to step on and, lifted, look around a bit.

Facing sunset

They were here the better part of a week, and they left a week ago today, and I'm just now getting back to normal.

My mom (she's the one in the black) came down on the big hydrofoil from Fort Myers with my Aunt Liz (in maize, with her grandchildren Junita and Federico) and my Aunt Nadine (with her second son, Robert, a Baptist pastor from Orange County), and of course we had to go out to Higgs Beach to make long shadows in the winter sunset.

There was some dinner and dancing at La Te Da, brunch amid the chickens at Blue Heaven, slow walks along Old Town streets -- the usual tourist stuff. And it was great.

But three women in their 80s, used to independent living but having to interact under one roof. . . . Well, it wore me the hell out.

True love

I don't know Cynthia Edwards and Rick Boettger, who wrote a letter to the editor of the Citizen debunking an incorrect listing of a real-estate transaction on their house on Olivia; they were horrified their friends would think they were moving.

But I know quite well what they feel about this place. From their letter:

We love this place above all others. Mostly it's the people, and not just our friends. People we barely know, or even just see on the streets or at events, are the most complex and interesting we've found anywhere on earth. The mixture of Conchs, snowbirds, writer/artists, village folk, tourists, "guest workers," dancing ladies and wise old ecologists, spiritual seekers and grizzled fishermen is a pastiche of vivid humanity that puts Steinbeck's Cannery Row to shame and makes Hemingway's Parisian Moveable Feast seem downright Vegan.

We watch sunsets, chase angelfish, play tennis, and bike home through the balmy quiet back streets of Old Town. Impromptu concerts, small theater, drinks overlooking the Bight, rides on friends' boats, the Tropic Cinema, the ability to make a difference in local issues . . . no place else can compare.

Suffice it to say, no, 1402 Olivia St. No. 1 is not for sale. We're here to stay.