Winter has arrived on Key Largo. The forecast high today is 79°F. The locals are wearing long-sleeved shirts and windbreakers. Similar Baltic weather is predicted for the upcoming week. We turned off the A/C and opened the windows. The northeast breeze from across the North Atlantic Ocean was marvellous! My bedroom windows are louvered. After morning ablutions and application of soothing cream, I sat in my bedroom on the thatched vanilla-coloured chair apathetically preparing to dress myself in a wintry costume (a cotton shirt to replace the linen one). While doing so I stared at the shimmering sunlight and shadow upon the carpeted floor and listened to the rotating hum of the ceiling fan before gathering myself to descend to the larder.

My bedroom is the second one on the second floor of our townhouse. The aspect of the room is stark. It resembles the look of a room “staged” by a realtor. There are no wall hangings to speak off apart from a paper map hung by string which is almost entirely obscured behind the bedroom door that I never close. There are two single beds upon only one of which I routinely sleep. The room’s barren appearance with its ordinary lamps and dollar-store flower arrangement and accessories has been illuminated and magnified by having lately unlatched the storm shutters. Yet in spite of its desolation I do not find the room drab rather merely plain. It has a stoic civility.

Notwithstanding the remarkable alteration of our environment – akin no doubt to the first snowfall in Canada – I was intent upon preserving my erstwhile traditional customs; viz., the breakfast routine and cycling. I did however soon abandon any ambition to swim in the sea or at the pool. No telling what the consequence of this mercurial temperature fall might be; nor might I be able to endure the waves fraught by the wind. Instead my overall administration today was to take a much needed break from what (to be perfectly truthful) has been six months of narrow and commanding focus. Although as I now write this account and sip my tea with fresh squeezed lemon juice I have recovered much of my strength and gusto. Earlier today I was by contrast overcome by persistent fatigue and ennui. Indeed I permitted myself without either hesitation or remorse to succumb to the listlessness whenever I felt to do so, whether sitting at table munching on pieces of green apple or afterwards dosing with bobbing head in the drawing room.

I managed to withdraw sufficiently from this uncommon lassitude by noon or shortly thereafter. I set upon my tricycle like an animal in yoke about the milling wheel. It was an enterprise no doubt propelled by my undying need for requital, recompense for the privilege afforded me by the Great Unknown to fritter away on the Florida Keys without a moment’s interruption. I conducted the customary cycling performance of about 4 Kms about the compound. It is a small adhesion to a life of activity and motion but it succeeded to dispel the urgency.

Afterwards we together drove to the local provisioner for household goods and to effect the statutory cleanse of the automobile. It gave me the pleasure of distraction; and, as I discovered unwittingly, it rended the automobile its own apparently mandatory purge (quite literally an exhaustion). We have further animated our currency and future by booking a luncheon engagement in Key West at our favourite dining haunt nearby the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel (Casa Marina); namely, Louie’s Backyard.