Tag: vacation

  • Work avoidance.

    Miss Tibbit and I followed the tiny lizard footprints and tail wiggles through the driveway sand. They pitter pattered up a little slope, back down. Around a bump. Wee busy lizard feet. A winding curly trail crossed over the lizard tracks. Once. Twice. The lizard tracks ended in a particularly fancy curlicue. Uh oh. Miss Tibbit and I looked at each other. We’re pretty sure a snake just had breakfast.

    Later the Spouse and I gazed out at the Atlantic, trying to work up the energy to read our novels. I think the sun was going supernova above us. A pod of Bottlenose Dolphins arched and swam in the middle distance. “I guess we’re clear of sharks,” I said to the spouse and went in for a swim. Three pelicans glided at wave height along the pellucid outgoing tidewaters.

    Invisible jets roar overhead. “Clearly we have stealth technology now,” the Spouse observed. I’m more concerned with the miniature jets that swarm the shrubs near the stairs to the deck. Dozens of juicy dragon flies are busy with something in there.Carova Dragonfly

    Hamish has settled into our life here. He is squeaking his bunny toy across the livingroom. It keeps trying to get away. Tibbit makes wide passages around the coffee table. The base is a sculpture of two wild horses, their noble heads supporting the glass table surface. Tibbit is deeply suspicious of their total lack of animation. We all saw the horses outside. They stank and moved and were interesting.

    Vacation.

  • I’m a (naked) farmer.

    Written on the beach: Happy Bay, St Martin.

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    The sun competes with the wind for fierceness today. Same shockingly bright blue-green water gleaming under azure sky. Same beach filled with cows, naked people, and partially clothed people – and by filled I mean one or two people, here or there, along a kilometer or more of beach. The small herd of beef stock lounges under the palm trees and Caribbean scrub.

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    Sailboats bob. Jet skis roar by once an hour, sounding like an emergency, like an air raid. A naked man shooes away the cows coming to check out the WideEyedBeachFunks. He claps energetically, “git! git on!” he tells them. They amble away, looking not too bright. He turns to me all bronze-tan and anatomical. “I’m a farmer,” he says in a Missouri twang. “Thank you,” I tell him, eyes wide behind my incognito sunglasses.

    Vacation. Final beach day.

  • Seal-self doesn’t see in grayscale.

    I cross my legs at the ankle and spread my arms, belly down in the water. Friar’s Bay is shallow and calm, the water extra salty, the same temperature as the air. I float effortlessly: only nose, forehead and eyes above the water. The rest of me lurks just below the surface. I am a seal.

    I am a seal, and I monitor the strange beings hauled out on the sand before me. I flip and spin, to watch out to sea where the moored sailboats disgorge more of the many-limbed creatures. They too will haul out on the beach.

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    I flutter my flip…er, hands and feet to float over the little reef. There’re fish and seaweeds and urchins to be looked at in there. I flip and spin. The little black dog occupying the beach is heading toward two empty beach chairs and blue beach bag filled with snacks and novels. My seal self doesn’t care. My person self has concerns. The dog passes the chairs. Seal self dives, disappears among the rocks, emerges farther along the beach.

    Seal self and me self roll and roll in the water: the sky, the sea, the sky, the sea – shades and tones of blues and greens that defy likelihood. Somewhere else, someplace we used to be, it is grayscale. Some faintly remembered place where seal self will never be, doesn’t want to think about. We float, eyes above the waterline.

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  • The eerily prescient fortune cookie.

    I love fortune cookies. The way they snap and crumble into shards of fresh tasting, sugary crispness. That crunch. Learning to say a word in Chinese.

    shí liú. grape.

    I hold fortune cookies in my hand and think about the fortune before I crack them open. Will I meet new people? Should I trust the man with green eyes? Will monetary advantage be mine? Does adventure keep the heart young? Should I learn to dance?

    What are my lucky numbers?

    15. 22. 37. 8.

    I never pick the fortune cookie, I let it pick me.

    Yesterday a long delayed, blizzard-stuck package arrived at my snowy door. The boys (dogs) and I dumped it in the front parlor, which is our official package opening location. Rejected items never make it out of that room. Dirty antiques found in other people’s estates begin new lives in the WideEyedHousehold there. It is the ante-chamber to my life. It’s the room where I let guests linger until I decide if they are permitted to participate in my greater homestead. Sometimes they are, sometimes they aren’t. It’s chilly enough in the front parlor that the uninvited aren’t inclined to de-coat. Perfect, really, for moving folks right along: “Yes, yes, nice to see you too, stop by again sometime…”

    I digress.

    The package. It had a fortune cookie in it, taped to the packing list, right at the top of the box. Since there was only the one cookie, the choice had already been made, this cookie came to Me. I cracked it open.

    “There will be snorkeling in your future.”Fortune

    The boys and I crunched through the cookie and I sat back in Hamish the Corgi’s rockstar chair.

    IMG_1687I was stunned. How did this cookie know I was heading out to snorkel in the coming days? How could this cookie know? I chewed the last of the cookie, because of course that’s part of the deal with a fortune cookie. Ok. Better accept it, I thought to myself. I leaned over to unpack the rest of the box.

    FeetandDogsTen minutes later I flopped my flippered feet over to the mirror above the hearth to see what I looked like in a low volume, water-injected silicone skirted mask and red ultra-dry snorkel. Heh. I looked funny. But geez, that fortune cookie really had it right. Weird.