The Summer of Our Discontent

"There is a harmony in autumn, and a luster in its sky, which through the summer is not heard or seen, as if it could not be, as if it had not been!"

-Percy Bysshe Shelley

It's 47 degrees in the Crystal City this morning, perfectly cool with a forecast high of 68 on the 30th of May. Peg thought it was too cool last night to sleep comfortably without a blanket. I felt it was about right.

Meanwhile I'm told it was 95 back home in Panama City two days ago. You can have it.

P and I at least agree on that; as we've gotten older, our blood's become thicker and we can't tolerate the summer heat of Florida as we once did. That kind of inferno is just bad. Hell's depicted as blazingly, boilingly hot for a reason.

Looks like just another July Friday night over in PCB.

But life and work keep dragging me back. Tuesday's flight through Detroit and Atlanta to ECP fills me with dread. I hate being away from P, and the windshield tour in Bay County is nothing short of jarring after spending a couple weeks surrounded by the natural beauty of this place.

A larger national trend, with employers and institutions prying the work-at-home crowd out of their home offices and back into the cubicle, keeps pulling at me like a tide. Partners resent the fact that I don't show up for work and somehow post the same productivity numbers--indeed, better numbers--compared with any other lawyer in the building. Clients want me to come to their office, or sit at a conference room in mine. Old lawyers (and I count myself in that number chronologically) eschew Zoom depositions in favor of sitting at a big table with a witness and a pile of paper exhibits. Judges increasingly demand in-person appearances because of all the abuse of the system by the south Florida cohort that has massed a virtual invasion of the panhandle legal system. Huns with briefcases.

And then there's the farm, where nothing seems to move at more than a snail's pace in our quest to transform the barn into an event venue. A year or more beyond anticipated completion, devastatingly expensive, the whole venture just makes me want to stick a sign in the yard and be done with it. But in the meantime, it requires that I make the trip and stand there in the fire ants and sandspurs every few weeks to see what's happening, or more accurately what's not happening.

This being an election year, there will be the added irritant of at least some of my neighbors letting their revanchist politics bubble out in plain view. That happens some here as well--no place is fully immune--but Desantisland has a tendency to beam it into your face, all that ignorance and prejudice and Christian nationalism.

But my economic fortunes are still tied there, probably will be for the balance of my working life. They've dwindled over time, but I have a couple friends left around the panhandle, although I rarely see them when I'm there because I'm immersed in work. And by the time I've been there a couple days, I can at least mouth the phrase, "This isn't so bad."

This morning, however, stinks of dread, dread of being away from Peg, dread of the heat, dread of the angry, stupid edge of the place and time. I'll get through it. I just resent being dragged back to the reality that I truly won't be able to cobble together an uninterrupted summer up here in my present vocational situation, and with the farm like a black hole dragging us back to unfinished buildings and piles of building materials and detritus in the yard, always. Every few weeks we'll be apart, and I'll be back down south.

And now to pay for all that. Five calls today, and I really need to write this brief despite struggling with picking up the dictaphone and saying something coherent. I reckon it's not writer's block, judging from this blather.