Saturday, July 5, 2008

A Different Island, Once My Own

Back in 1994, the year my friend Sue died, I was alerted to the fact that I could rent an apartment on St. George Island for something like $350 a month.
Now even fourteen years ago, this was a terrific bargain, even taking into account the fact that what we’re calling an apartment here was actually two rooms and a bathroom in a cement block four-plex. But what the hell? It was right across the road from the Gulf of Mexico on St. George, which had not been completely ruined yet.
My two oldest children were basically living their own lives by then but my two youngest were around the ages of eight and five and definitely still under my wing so they became my little roommates there for the summer in that block apartment with its yard of foot-torturing gravel and sandspurs.
I decorated the apartment with Dollar Store Christmas lights and colorful fish to hang on the wall made in China of reed and cloth (which I still have and which hang on the wall here in my bedroom on Dog Island) and every time we’d come back to the apartment after a trip home to Tallahassee, I’d burn sage for some reason. There were no particular evil spirits in that place as far as I knew but perhaps I burned it to purify something inside of me and if so, it did no harm, at least.
Mr. Moon came down on weekends to join us and to fish and it was my first and still most prolonged experience with living at the beach.
I was in a strange state of grief that summer and still feeling the effects of Sue’s death which had been such a profoundly holy experience that I was in some holy state myself it seemed, my heart opened by grief and the brief glimpse of the certainty that in this life we are only sandwiched between birth and death and the existence of other states of being on each side of those portals.
I do indeed think now that that summer I spent in my little concrete home by the Gulf was a time of holiness and if sage was one of the sacraments, so were beer and rum and limes and chips and salsa and Jimmy Buffett whose music (and say what you will about it) was exactly what I needed at that moment in my life.
At the time, the children were not as entranced with the beach life as I was, although they look back at it now with great affection. I had to force them to accompany me to the beach every morning, their brown little bodies slathered in sunscreen, with our thermos jug of Raspberry Crystal Lite, our towels, our beach toys, our books. They much preferred staying inside with the air conditioning and the TV to watch old reruns of Lucy and The Brady Bunch (we had cable!) but they would go with me, albeit grudgingly, and we would float in the gentle waves and sing Jimmy Buffett songs and in the evenings we would walk the beach after supper, watching the dolphins make their slow return from the cut, west to east, rising to breathe with noisy exhalations, then falling silently back into the water beside us, so close and yet in a different universe entirely and as all of the walls between the universes had become blurred to me when I accompanied Sue to that place she went, I was more than aware of what all that meant and the dolphins rising into the land of air and falling back into the land of water beside me was somehow comforting.
That summer was when I first learned how much I loved living out of doors as much as possible. We’d brought a cheap plastic table down and set it up right beside the apartment and that was where I sat to eat, to read, and to write while the children watched TV inside or played house under the fronds of the palm tree in front of the complex. I sat at that table even if it was hot or buggy or dark and at night I burned citronella candles and I read or wrote by those.
I began to write on yellow legal tablets: poems, short stories, and letters. This was a year before I got my first computer and I took up my pens, my paper and my thoughts and I wrote with a vengeance and a wonder.
It was all the beginning of something or some things, even as others had ended. It felt, at the time, as if I were doing so very little- playing with the children, cooking our meals, reading, dancing, spending hours by the Gulf, crying, laughing, sleeping, writing poems, watching the stars at night including the great blur of the Milky Way, visible then on the relatively still-unlit beach, but looking back I see how very much I was doing.
I want to say I was healing, but I don’t know if this is true. I think instead, it was more a time of integrating Sue’s passage than healing from her illness and death although I could be wrong.
We ended up renting an apartment in that little funky complex for three summers. The children were willing enough and they had come to love that island life, even if more for the ice cream shop they could walk to than the vast beauty of the ocean, the dunes, the sky, the birds. We journeyed to Apalachicola for shopping and adventures, to Jack Rudloe’s Marine Specimen’s Lab in Panacea to touch and learn about the sea creatures we saw on the beach, and we played bingo on Tuesday nights at the St. George fire station. One night Jessie won the jackpot and she used her winnings to buy herself her own pair of Panacea Nikes (rubber boots like the ones the workers in the seafood industry wore and which she coveted) at the store in East Point.
People came to visit us there in our little nest. My best friend from high school came and she and I (the kids stayed home with Dad that weekend) took ourselves skinny dipping late one night in the bath-water warm Gulf and we floated for hours under a full moon, talking about everything, sharing all the secrets we’d had no one to tell for all our years apart.
The older kids came with friends, my Liz of the West came and spent an enchanted weekend with us. We had adventures of one sort or another. We made friends with Wayne, who lived in another apartment, a sweet-hearted drunk who sat in front of the complex and drank beer all day and who watered my plants when I was away.
Our time there ended. Our view of the Gulf was obstructed by the construction of new tall skinny houses that tourists rented. The children developed friendships and interests in town they were loath to leave. The island became more crowded. I probably began to feel guilty “wasting” so much time doing nothing but hanging out on the beach, sleeping on a futon with my feet in the canned goods, sitting on the roof of the building next door, listening to the cicadas as they chorused their deafening song from one tree to the next until the song had encircled the entire island as the sun set, painting the sky and water with rosy gold and the moon rose, as my heart opened to a sort of joy it could never have been opened to if Sue’s death hadn’t broken it in two.
Looking back, I see that those summers, especially the first, had as much to do with who I am now as almost anything. And as I am writing this, on a yellow legal tablet, sitting beside the water, knowing that I am going to send these words out into the universe via a phone line and a computer, I am amazed.
Listen- there is nothing that is meaningless. There is nothing that involves water and air and children and words and sorrow and joy that is a waste of time.
And I still love Jimmy Buffett who managed to get me off my sorrowful ass and made me sing with my children in the warm green waters of the Gulf, our heads in the air universe, our bodies in the water universe, surrounded no doubt by the great fish and smiling dolphins. They were there. We couldn’t always see them.
But they were there.

5 comments:

  1. That was absolutely beautiful. I am so thankful I was one of the few that got to experience that with you. I just wish I remembered more of it. I remember small bits, like me sitting tiredly in your lap as you read us "The Wind and the Willows", and spending hours sitting on the shore digging up periwinkles for you to make soup with, and of course the bingo with Mr. Bean. Thanks for making me live on that beach and giving me those experiences. I hold those memories close to my heart.

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  2. Snakes Store Island- we had us some nice summers there, didn't we, baby?

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  3. wow.... I really needed that post just now. really needed it and I didn't even know it yet. Thank you, Ms Moon.

    "Listen- there is nothing that is meaningless. There is nothing that involves water and air and children and words and sorrow and joy that is a waste of time." I'm printing that out right now. I hope that's ok. Damn. that hit me just right :)

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  4. Ms. Ample- honestly, I was thinking that line would resound with you when it came out of me.
    Maybe it was sent to you.
    Whatever, it is yours to use however you want it.

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