One Particular Harbour

"Look in vain for many in-depth studies on the only thing that matters, what it feels like to live in the world you live in. That’s so they can take your home, the thing that made you, and shatter it, piece by piece."

-Melissa Holbrook Pierson, The Place You Love is Gone: Progress Hits Home

Another late start after over two hours of reading tax after Peg left for work. It's not terribly difficult in concept, but voluminous and detailed. I'm already sweating how I'm going to build an outline to take into the final exam that will get me even close to hitting the target in December.

Oddly grieving the loss of my mother this morning, fourteen months after the event. It's fall, the time when I'd be planning a holiday trip to Texas to see the folks either for Thanksgiving or Christmas. There would've been a lot of energy in those houses, with kids and extended, blended families filling the space. All quiet now, all those expansive days shrank from Mom's big house to the one story house, to the single room at Hidden Springs, to the little box in the columbarium. It is the way, I guess.

I've also found myself mourning over the last couple days our relationship with Florida, my home for most of the last thirty-three years. I came there in 1991 filled with illusions that washed into my life through a pile of Jimmy Buffett cassettes, built a career there, raised kids along the shores of the St. Andrew Bay, fell in love and found myself, in the end.

A little further east, I learned to be a farmer, awakening each morning to Peg's Sentries, the pine trees right outside the bedroom window at Wyldswood. We mourned their loss in Idalia.

We've had some times there. Hell, most of my adult life was spent in those places. Most of our friends have also spent their lives there.

So what does one do with this moment, when I feel such disdain for Florida, all political it seems?

Maybe it's not fair to blame Florida for the MAGA scourge, although the virus seems to have completely infected the patient there.

The whole country, from this vantage point, presents the same dilemma: how do we live among people who are willing to fill in the oval in the voting booth for that man, for that worldview?

I'm not the only one mourning this.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/10/lament-election-different-trump/680253/

We talk about fleeing to the Dordogne or to Sligo, but it's hard to see us at this season of life doing that. Perhaps we'll give ourselves the gift of a month there when the rioting and insurrection enter full swing around inauguration day. Or, worse yet, when there's no insurrection because the insurrectionist is the one taking the oath that day.

Florida may be an actual meme for craziness, but it's not all our fault.

"Our"? Not sure that fits. I've always been sort of from nowhere.

In the end, I find myself thinking of Danny Devito's advice to the man seeking a divorce at the end of the War of the Roses. I can't find the quote online, and it's been years since I've seen the movie, but I recall it going something like this. Devito plays a divorce lawyer, who over the previous couple hours describes the tragicomic tale of a successful couple who go from sexual obsession to marriage to gradually brewing disgust for one another to, ultimately, dying when the chandelier from which they're dangling falls in the foyer of the house they lived in together during the divorce because neither was willing to part with the place.

Devito's advice is for the would-be client to avoid the divorce, to look back and try to find that spark, that thing about the other person that made marriage seem like a good idea, and cultivate it. The alternative could be worse.

So P and I--well, I can only speak for myself--need to recall what's good about this place that's been so very good to us for such a long time. The natural beauty of the coast. The cuisine. The Southern sense of humor that doesn't take anything all that seriously, and values a little fun every now and then. We can love upstate New York and the people here, but they're not us in the end. We're those crazy bastards clinging to the Gulf Coast and to the pine barrens of the Big Bend. And they, with all their faults (as if we aren't carrying around a whole steamer trunk of our own), are us.