A Tale Of Hippie Life

Suffering huge amounts of existential angst this morning due to being in my head which was up my butt, I decided to go do something physical in the garden. Because I am me, I had to wait until it was truly good and hot before I stepped outside but the sun was mostly behind a cloud for the first half hour and that helped. I pulled the spent tomato plants and their wire baskets, did a little weeding, and then picked the six rows of peas. As you can see in the picture above, some of them were already dried in the pod and that is of no matter. They will cook just fine, and since they are so small, will take hardly any longer to become tender than the ones that are greener and still fat with moisture. 

I was thoroughly soaked through with sweat by that time and came back in the house and after lunch I sat down in front of the TV and shelled pretty steadily for two hours and that's what I got in the next picture. Mr. Moon, who was taking care of business up until just a few minutes ago, took over the shelling. The heat and lack of water while we were gone did no favors to the plants and I'm not sure we'll be getting much more. This summer's garden is a bust, as far as I'm concerned. 

Except for the green beans, of course. 

Maurice has been crazier than usual since we got home. She has ignored her true love- Glen- and the one time she did pay him a visit in his chair she bit the shit out of his hand. For the past few days she's seemed to want to hang out with me which is fine except that yes, she bit the shit out of my hand too. 
I yelled at her. I know it upsets her a great deal when we leave but we can't not ever go anywhere just because our insane pet doesn't like it. Jack is always obviously glad we're home and snuggles up as close to me as he can get which is a rather nice way of letting us know he missed us but snuggling is not Maurice's love language unless it is accompanied by a clamp-down of her strong, fanged jaws on our old thin-skinned body parts. I swear that if Maurice was as big as a Labrador retriever, she could crush our skulls like eggs. 
And undoubtably would. 

I really appreciated all of your comments and thoughts on yesterday's post. I have answered them all. Many of you are concerned with rising sea levels and yes, that is a consideration. So are hurricanes. There is some natural protection from the barrier islands in front of the property- Dog Island, and St. George Island. But no house on the coast is ever entirely safe from the risk of winds and water and that absolutely has to be accepted by anyone who lives right near the water. The house is built way up on pilings and I cannot foresee a time in my life when water would rise that high. 

Am I saying that a hurricane couldn't rip off the roof and allow water in that way? 
Oh hell no. 

But these coastal houses are built according to strict guidelines which does increase their ability to withstand storms. I am always amazed while on St. George at the number of rather ramshackle older houses (more than forty years old), built entirely of wood with some built directly on the ground, who have survived so many, many storms intact. Oh, if only we'd bought one of those thirty years ago when the prices were less astronomical. I remember trying to talk Mr. Moon into buying a tiny cement block place on the beach on St. George and he wasn't interested in it and that house is still there and we have both expressed regrets about not buying it. 

But. You know. Live and learn. 

I probably shouldn't go on about the house like this because it is so far from being a sure thing and I am still very much waffling on whether or not I feel as if I could even begin to accept the reality of owning such a home. 

I remember, almost fifty years ago, living in a house just a few miles east of this house on the bay. It was a beat-up old thing, big and rambling, with the flooring in some rooms so rotten that you couldn't go in them. There was no electricity, no running water, and some friends of the band that my first husband was playing in were squatting there with a few other people. This was in Panacea, Florida. It sat right on the bay, that house, and so despite the shortcomings of the place, there were charms. We were at an in-between place in our lives with very little money coming in and had burnt out on living in the Jim Walters house north of Tallahassee on the back of a cow pasture although it did have electricity AND running water, so when these two guys who were living in the house asked us if we wanted to move in, we did. We got one of the rooms with decent flooring. There was a bed in the room already (can you imagine that mattress?) and there was a supply of kerosine lamps. The two guys owned a bar down the road a piece and the band was playing there a lot and I began tending bar there too. There was a shower in the building where the bar was and we made do with that for hygiene. Cooking was tricky in the old house and I do not really remember how that worked but I do know we cooked. 
I really have no idea how long we lived there. It could have been months or it could have been weeks. It is all very much a blur except for the day I realized I was probably pregnant. We ate breakfast almost every day at a now-defunct restaurant called The Oaks and the idea of eggs and all the breakfast foods made me nauseous and I ate a Greek salad for breakfast for weeks. 

And that was Hank wanting me to eat those Greek salads. I was just a few months past my 21st birthday.

There's a whole lot more to this story but soon my ex and I moved back to Tallahassee, first living in a room of some friends' house. They had children so things were fairly normal there. Running water, a bathroom, electricity, etc. And eventually we moved into an apartment not three blocks from where Jessie lives now and where Hank himself lived with his then-girlfriend Taylor years ago. It was a small apartment but it had a blue-tiled bathroom and that was all I wanted. 

And now here we are and even just considering buying a house near that one I lived in so long ago (which is now not even a pile of lumber) which not only has running water but also THREE bathrooms, and Lord have mercy! Each bedroom has a solid floor, is nothing short of unimaginable. 

The distance between Panacea and this house may be less than twenty miles but the distance between that house and this has to be measured in light years. 

And I feel more than unsure that this old hippie woman could make that leap. 

Here's one of the many, many electric light lamps in the house we looked at. 

And a little more wall decor for your viewing pleasure. 

Ay-yi-yi and Yippie Ki Yay, motherfuckers, as Bruce Willis said in the first Die Hard movie. I think. Correct me if I am wrong which I probably am. 

Love...Ms. Moon