Tuesday, Then Wednesday

Mr. Moon went on a fishing trip today with a guide on a lake in Fellsmere. I grew up hearing of Fellsmere but honestly, have had little knowledge of it. I just googled it however, and what an interesting town! It is supposedly known as the "most Mexican town in Florida" and is where the first woman in the deep south was legally allowed to cast a vote. Zena M. Dreier. 
It is also, I will have you know, the home of the Fellsmere Frog Leg Festival. 
Do not laugh. Frog legs provided many an early Florida settler with the protein to survive. 

Anyway, he got up so early the sun hadn't even thought of coming out yet and had, according to him, the very best day of bass fishing in his entire life. It was all catch and release and I have a feeling that if right this second after that day on the water, it wouldn't take a whole lot for me to convince the man that we needed a house here. River fishing, lake fishing, ocean fishing! 
Is it heaven or what?

So I thought I'd walk up to the Methodist Church thrift store but discovered they were closed on Tuesday and decided to just do a little ramble which I did. I walked down the road that linked my house to my best friend Lucille's house as a child which we would walk each other home on, sometimes three or four times before we tired of it. Back and forth. 

I wanted to stop by the house I lived in again. I wanted to see if I could make my way through the overgrown plants to peer into windows, to see if anything I remembered was still the same. 
Lord, the place is creepy. I swear to you, it's almost as if the evil that happened there has taken over a sweet little white stucco house and turned it into a brown-wood paneled, windows-boarded-over, vegetation-taken-over, dark place of dread. 

You know the little sea grape plants I started from seed I am so proud of? Those thick limbs and trunks are from a mature sea grape, grown tall and thick enough to block sight of the house. I saw NOTHING I recognized. Not a tree, not a hibiscus, not a window showing me a terrazzo floor, not a bright, airy screened in back porch, not the tree I climbed and read whatever book I could get my hands on. 
Gone. All gone. Different additions, Doors where there were none before, windows that are made of bubbly glass so that even though they weren't boarded over, you could not see in. 

You can barely see the house from the road. 

Somehow, though it didn't trigger me. Perhaps because it WAS so different. If it was still a pretty little house surrounded by hibiscus and surinam cherries and periwinkles it might have felt like too much of a wrongness.
On I walked. 

The road in the first photo is the same white-sand road we used to drive to the bowling alley in Sebastian. Ercildoun Bowling Alley where my mother was on a league sponsored by the Last Chance Grocery Store. 
I am not making this up. That bowling alley was about the coolest thing in a twenty mile radius. Now the road dead ends in the Kelso Medical Complex and that's a whole other story involving Dr. Kip Kelso, the man who was the only physician between Vero and Melbourne. 
I was terrified of him and if I am to be honest, I don't know why but my terror of all things medical may stem from something that happened involving him although I don't think it happened to me. 

As I walked, names came back to me of the people who had lived in the houses I passed. Why I can't remember the name of someone I met last week but can indeed remember the name of the people I knew as a child is beyond me but I know is a sign of old age brain. 

Rosa Garrett, Riene and Oliver, Helen and Ed Kretschmer, Joy and Ralph Holtzclaw, Betty Mockridge, the Volkers, Micky, Dicky, Lucille, Helen, and Paul Ferger and their mother, Josephine. Aunt Katy who was a thousand years old who sat on her porch and told us young'uns the story of how Roseland came to be named by her father. 

"Uncle Larry" the man who lured me and Lucille into his little sports car and touched our not-yet-breasts and whom we had trusted because he was a friend of Josephine's, and Lucille and I never, ever talked about that. 

Nelly Campbell, who was the post mistress for a long time. 
My brain easily gives up these names and if I do not drown in the memories, I am at least washed in them. 

******************

Wednesday Night

I never finished last night's post but that was the sunset. I swear, it won't look like anything dramatic and then you look through the camera lens and you're seeing the damn Rapture. 

There is so much more I want to add to what I was writing about yesterday. And I will. I am filled with all of these things. 

Today has been one more perfectly beautiful day. This has been the sweetest get-away I can remember having with my husband. It has been the most laid-back week with no pressure from either of us to do anything. We have laughed so much, we have loved so much, we have been as childish as seven-year olds, we have been as tender as new sweethearts and as silly as seven-year olds. 

We have been sitting on the dock over my river every night. And every night I have been filled with gratefulness that my soul can be so incredibly overwhelmed with a sense of peace that nothing else can bring me. 

The river tonight was a mirror, there was no wind at all. And the stillness brings a different sort of beauty than the evenings when the breeze riffles and even white-caps the river. 

An osprey perches on a branch overlooking the shore every night and makes its whistling call. 

I think she is a juvenile and I wonder if she is calling for her mate or for a parent. I hear the anxiety in her voice, the worry. I know how that feels. I know she's fine. And yet...
I hate to leave the dock while she is still there. I want to know all is well with her. 

As much as I love my home in Lloyd, I hate leaving this place. 
I love it so much. 

And I love being alone in a world of our own with this man. 

Tomorrow we pack and drive home. 

Sigh. 

Love...Ms. Moon