Dear, I thought I’d drop a line
The weather’s cool
The folks are fine
I’m in bed each night at nine
PS I love you

Billie Holiday

We’re in for some stormy weather overnight. The sky has changed to a soupy grey colour though the rain is not expected until closer to midnight after which the temperature will drop and the skies will clear. By Christmas Day things are predicted to be comfortable. It will just be pleasant to have rounded the corner of the Winter Solstice.

There once was a man named Rex
Endowed with small organs of sex;
When tried for exposure
He replied with composure
“De minimis non curat lex!”

Appropriation and compromise don’t normally go hand-in-hand. Yet by an odd twist piracy and bargain are convenient and comfortable companions.

I’ve decided that cycling 15 kms a day is the limit for me at my age! Besides I can’t think of a good reason to exhaust myself. Not that my exercise is ever particularly strenuous. It satisfies my personal ambition just to roll along the pathway for an hour and half each day. And being here for the season is an unparalleled privilege by any standard! The sun, the azure dome, the palms, the sea birds of every description, just being at sea level not to mention the sea and the boats. The nautical influence is for me largesse personified!

Everything comes and goes, we all know that. There is the good and the bad about everything. Basically things change. That’s the two sides of the universe, the binary view of it all. Keeping the pathway moving towards the good stuff is the challenge. It’s always easy to close a door, to walk away, to forget, to ignore, to pretend you were never there.

It would be an unwarranted extension to proclaim that after having been on Longboat Key for the past month and a half, and having returned here after last year for another season, that I am beginning to blend in with the wallpaper and that my babbling is starting to sound like a television ad. Nonetheless the indisputable truth is that while cycling along Gulf of Mexico Drive late this afternoon I couldn’t help thinking how commonplace everything now appears to me, how my vision of the place has become so astute as to remark upon the lines and crevices in the sidewalk, how noticeable are the newly arrived tourists, in short how “residential” I feel in spite of my foreign citizenship and remote domicile.

We received an invitation today to rally with friends in Naples. Earlier other friends pushed off from Canada to Hilton Head Island; they connected with us en route while driving in North Carolina. Yet another couple is ramping up to a winter sojourn in Portugal. My sister and her husband are making plans to go to California for a brief visit. Their daughter and her husband plan a trip to Taiwan. Meanwhile locally there was a dearth of activity. This partly reflects the uncommonly dreary weather today but more strategically heralds the uptick of anticipated visits from northerners immediately following Christmas. For my part I content myself to listen to Mozart’s Mass in C Minor as sufficient evidence of my preparation for the season.

It hardly seems appropriate or predictable that I should require or relish a recovery from a three-day holiday jaunt to the Southern Florida Keys, yet it is so. There was not a drop of alcohol contaminating or fuelling the furlough – an admonition which historically prevailed. Yet the boon of home is not to be diminished. Among the favours are a clean car, standard fare for the larder, strong black coffee, laundered clothing, the convenience of a laptop computer and re-connecting with friends and associates regarding both personal and business matters.

The humidity would have been intolerable had we not been lounging by the pool, sipping iced water, casually regarding the iguanas scrambling onto the pergola or ferrying across the pool, lying beneath the oven hot sun absorbing the refreshing and decidedly welcome breeze, floating in the buoyant salt water of the Gulf of Mexico or wallowing like manatees in the oblong pool.

We’re off to Key Largo to celebrate my upcoming 71st birthday and to check out the place we’ve contracted to rent next season. We like Key Largo. We’re staying at a hotel we’ve frequented before, Playa Largo, which with some legitimacy is heralded as the Pearl of the Florida Keys. As usual we intend to spend our entire time on the resort. The dining is superb. Typically in the Keys the beaches are nothing special but the pool is very attractive. The views over the turquoise water are always guaranteed to fascinate.