Visiting A River Town

Today has been a bit of a tough one for me. This morning's dream had dragged on and on and it was the worst sort of dream. I had lost my child. In this case, Jessie. In the dream she was still just a very young child, maybe two or three, and tiny, as she was in real life until her genes took over and she turned into the tall, beautiful woman she is now. The child weighed twenty-seven pounds for a year, I swear, which meant that I could carry her in a sling for a long, long time and I did. 
In the dream we were in a huge mall or building. Many stores, and there were hiking trails and waterfalls too. Parts of this behemoth structure have been in my dreams before but I don't think I'd ever lost a child in any of those. It was one of those situations where I turned my back and she was gone and I had to climb and pull myself up cliffs and go from space to place calling her name, panicking and begging for help. Finally, I did find her and I held her and would not let her go. 

Just writing this, all these hours later, brings tears to my eyes. Isn't losing a child every mother's worst nightmare? And haven't we all lost a child for at least a moment or two? I guess it is such a visceral thing that even when children are grown and parents themselves, that fear is tattooed to our bones. 

I just couldn't make myself do anything this morning, so I sat and worked on the current jigsaw puzzle I've been doing and waited for Mr. Moon to finish mowing because he had asked me to go to the coast with him for lunch. He needed to pick up a boat at a marina where he'd gotten some work done on it and I decided that I would go and I did and I was okay, mostly quiet but fine, really. I asked him on the way if the restaurant at St. Mark's was even open on Monday and he told me that he'd called and yes, they were. We were hungry by the time we got there so we ate our lunch first at a place on the river which is really quite beautiful. The structure over the open-to-the air dining area is a huge palapa, the kind built in Mexico, and it was gorgeous. 

You can't really get the scale of the height of it in the picture but it was tremendously tall. 
We sat overlooking a little piece of the river and a dock and the grackles amused us as we ate. There was a male who was trying his best to woo a lady. 

He sang and he chittered and he sang some more. 

And then he danced, fluffing his wings and fancy-footing it, his black feathers gleaming blue in the light. Ms. Grackle watched him with calm detachment and then flew away, all of his efforts put to waste. But we were amused and entertained as well. 

After we ate we drove the three hundred yards or so to the marina and Mr. Moon got out of the truck and I stayed behind and waited for him to find his boat. Soon he came back, got in the truck and said, "Well, damn. I should have called the marina when I called the restaurant." 
There are not open on Mondays!
We had to laugh and as he put the truck in reverse he said, "I guess I'll be eating fried shrimp again soon." And we laughed some more. 

St. Mark's is a tiny town not so far from here, near the coast. You can put into the river there and boat down to the Gulf which we have done before. 

There's an old fort there and a trail that begins in Tallahassee dead ends there. There's also a wildlife refuge with a lighthouse nearby that many people visit. It's an interesting little place. But there are parts of it which I had never seen before so we drove down some roads and by golly, there is an entire residential area I was unaware of. We saw houses that are proof that fishermen do not make much of a living to a pea-green monster of castle house, rising four stories into the air. There was a charter school, a city park, and lots and lots of pure Florida jungle with cabbage palms and cedars, wild thistles and iris. I'd seen a sign for Shell Island Fish Camp many times and today I finally saw it! It looks exactly like a fish camp should look with old cottages and new, fishing poles leaning up against them, barbecue grills, and flip-flops lined up outside doors. I told Mr. Moon that it looked to me like the sort of place that if you were trying to get away from someone (say- a wife) and you lived in someplace like Spokane, it would be the perfect place to flee to. Who would look for you there? 

So that was interesting and fun. There's a sign underneath the Welcome to St. Mark's sign that says, "A Golf Cart Community." When we passed it I told my husband that whenever I see a sign like that it translates to "Town Where Old Fuckers Go To Die" to me. 
And that made him laugh. 

When we got home we found it had rained here and quite a bit. I was happy for my garden and for all the growing things. 
Well, except for the bamboo and croscomia, etc. 
I had planned on doing more mulberry picking and jam making today but obviously did neither. I did check on the berry status.

So fat and plentiful. Ah well. There is always tomorrow.

And the sugar snap peas have been making pods. 

These peas are best eaten raw, whole, as the pods are as sweet as the peas. They are also very good steamed lightly (in the pods) with new potatoes and served with perhaps a simple and innocent white sauce. I have been fixing and eating them that way since my first garden when I was twenty-three. Best of course, if the potatoes have just come out of the dirt in the same garden as the peas were grown. 

I think I will finish that puzzle this evening. My new addiction. As if I needed another one. 
Well, whatever gets you through the night. 
It's all right. It's all right. 
Or at least that's what I tell myself.

Love...Ms. Moon