Reentry

I have had a snowbird experience.

Usually this phenomenon takes place over the roughly three months of a Florida summer, but in my case it happened over the three fall months during which we were traveling through Europe, Thailand, and Bali, in a great, post-retirement blowout of a trip.

Returning from the delights of Prague and Amsterdam, the ice-blue weirdness of Iceland, and the disco-ball mania of Kuta, Bali, and Pattaya Beach, Thailand, to the Gulf Coast of Florida is both culture shock and comfort.

When we first pulled into the driveway, our yard looked somehow diminished, like a childhood home that isn't as grand or as spacious as you'd remembered. (A week later, it has improved a great deal.)

I have forgotten the names of every other neighbor, but not of their dogs. I have to ask their neighbors what their names are, lest I be shamed. "Oh, that's okay," they tell me. "They've probably forgotten yours by now and think you're just a snowbird."

Really, though, not a lot changes during three months in Port Charlotte.

Any "For Sale" signs that have come down have been replaced by others sprouting up on different properties.

One barn of a place around the corner--a concrete edifice with its interior still one vast hall undivided by rooms--is under such painfully slow construction that its owners accomplish only one perceptible change per year.  Last year, it was windows. This year, instead of a large board, there is an honest-to-God double door. It is held in place by what look like giant black staples. Perhaps real hinges will appear next year.

Half the neighbors wave "how are ya" as if I haven't been gone. Others accost me with, "We didn't know what happened to you! We didn't see you any more!"  Then, more darkly, "And you never do know, do you?"

"No, you never do!" I reply. "And by the way, has anybody died or become critically impaired since we've been gone?"

Others had more faith. "We thought you were probably okay because your articles were still showing up in the paper."

Little did they know. I could have been taken into white slavery in Denpasar. I had banked a dozen articles to fill the deadlines when I was gone, and no one would have been the wiser.

And a few things exhibit shocking change when you are gone that long.

A dozen new restaurants have opened their doors--which may well be closed by this time next year.

Shorn of the dense shrubbery that had always hid it from view, one house has become so unrecognizable that I thought it had been torn down and replaced, whole. It seems bigger and farther forward on its lot without all those bushes pushing it into the background. They say that its ceiling is caving in and its floors have rotted. And suddenly it stands exposed to view like an embarrassed elderly hospital patient whose johnny won't fasten.

The dogs' old nemesis, a fat grey squirrel, still taunts them by climbing atop the pool cage and frisking his tail. But now he has gone too far and peed down on their heads as they barked.

"Roly, I can't believe he did that!"

"No, Doxie, it's true. This is his stinky squirrel piss all right."

Many neighbors no longer wave when they pass me in their cars. They are no doubt new and don't know me yet, but they will before long.

Sea Hibiscus Blvd.

Time-lapse blogs are a wonderful thing. Just as time-lapse photography fast-forwards into the future, this post will now reveal the completed sea hibiscus boulevard.  

The sea hibiscuses are at this point taller than the house and must be hacked back brutally to stay in line.

My birthday present—an arched trellis that I'd been planning as the entryway—went into place about a year ago.  The Dutchman’s pipe, a bizarre plant whose flowers look like bruised scrota, has by now grown like crazy, crawled all over it, and threatens to strangle the sea grape to its right. 

One approaches this vision around the corner of the house, past the Mexican petunia bed on the left and, on the right, the heliconia, ti plant, and Plant from Mars, which got its name because I had no clue what it was.  I couldn’t find it anywhere online, and our landscaper's brother, who claims to know everything, didn't know what it was. It just grew there one day, I chop it back periodically, and it shoots up again. It has big, cabbagelike leaves with frilly white edges. It's on the right in this picture, behind the ruby-leaved ti plant.

I'm persistent to a fault. After hours of hunting for Plant from Mars online, I stumbled upon a nursery in South Carolina called Woodlanders, which specializes in unusual plants, and wrote to them via Contact Us. I apparently asked the right guy, because Bob McCartney wrote back to tell me that a contact in Gainesville told him it is Acalypha wilkesiana forma circinata, more modestly known as Jacob's coat. Like my sea hibiscus, it hails from Southeast Asia and has many medicinal uses. One website said its stalk is poisonous; others suggested boiling its leaves and drinking the tea to cure everything from pleurisy to diarrhea. I don't think this is a good idea.

Here's Bob McCartney's backstory:

In seeking out people who had been involved with the cultivation of native southern plants, the trail led to Bob McCartney at Colonial Williamsburg Foundation in Williamsburg, Virginia. Colonial Williamsburg's gardens relied heavily on native plants and for more than a decade Bob had been collecting, propagating and introducing into the extensive gardens and grounds a wide range of seldom cultivated species.

What's so odd about all this is that I appear to have found a hobby in the last field I ever would have guessed. I've never liked gardening or considered myself a gardener--even though my mother was one. But it's just so darn easy in Florida, among all these weirdo plants that become like pets.

Growing sea hibiscus

I eventually planted over two dozen sea hibiscus saplings and seedlings, which I’d been nurturing for six months, all the way from a sackful of seed pods, to a tray of seeds on the kitchen counter, to pots on the lanai. I'd moved them around the lanai when they were threatened by downpours, repotted them twice as they grew, sprayed them when something unpleasant and invisible was eating their leaves, until finally they pleaded to be put out.

Here's a stalwart Tonga native who knows how to grow these things from a trunk like the one he has in his hands. These are clearly as easy to grow as sticking a bare trunk in the ground and watering it. 

I failed at this simple approach. Apparently seed propagation is my thing, instead. 

Who knew?  I do not consider myself a gardener, but maybe I need to rethink this. 

The initial vision I had was of a living fence lining the path leading to our back patio. Someday we would even put an arched trellis in place at the entrance to this path.

Here's what such a boulevard might look like.

If they get truly out of hand, I understand sea hibiscus can be invasive. 

I guess I should fear for the foundations of our home, but I figure by then we'll be long gone and it won't be our problem. I could, of course, be wrong and come to regret this.

Florida woman goes to library

After you move from the scholarly western suburbs of Boston to the coast of Southwest Florida, a few things may unsettle you at first.  

There are, of course, the gap-toothed guys driving around in pickup trucks flying Confederate flags.  

You realize that news reports about Florida Man or Florida Woman—a recent form of Homo sapiens—now come out of your own fair state.  You know Florida Man, of course you do.  “Florida man assaults wife with machete for buying toilet paper at Walmart.”  Only in Florida, you think.

Groceries are surprisingly pricey here. The ice cream truck plays Christmas carols, year round. The sun sets into the ocean.  Given the FCAT scores, you wonder if kids here ever go to college. 

You suspect they might not even have libraries in this neck of the woods.

Up north, you’ve spent hours in the cool solitude of brick-bound establishments that have either presided over their community since the nineteenth century or been built to look as if they have.  

Your first library was in the heart of the tree-lined colonial streets of Concord, Mass.  The Concord Free Public Library’s Victorian Gothic spire first rose at the base of a triangle of land bisecting Main Street and Sudbury Road in 1873--to be rivaled in grandeur only by the Massachusetts State Reformatory up the road. Over the years it grew into a Greek revival temple with columns bracketing the front entrance and wings on both sides.  

You remember the way it smelled and felt, its Children’s Room with a fully furnished and lighted Victorian dollhouse, three hours curled up devouring its entire Bobbsey Twins collection.  There, you came to love the rich, musty smell of library books; the satisfying crinkle of the plastic covers taped over dust jackets with ribbed transparent tape; the list of purple stamps on each book’s unique card, which told you who had read the book before you and how long it had taken them to read it.

Your last library in the Northeast was the Beverly Farms branch library, renovated to emulate the brick-bound dignity of a place like the Concord Free Public.  By that time, you could search for and reserve books online, looking forward to their arrival like Amazon packages.  Except … they were free!

It seemed too much to expect such amenities on the Southwest Florida frontier. 

But the Mid-Country Regional Library up the Tamiami Trail has all that and more, suddenly making you feel at home.  Instead of manila cards, books now have printout due-date slips tucked into the envelope in their inside back cover.  The building is clearly modern, not Greek revival.  But as long as you can electronically seek, reserve, look forward to, hold, smell, and crinkle a library book here, for free, all’s well.  

They’re a bit more stern about late fines here, but I guess they have to be, with Florida Man and all.

The Cult of the Bush-Head Ladies

Cultivating a friendship when you’re a new transplant to Florida is as important and can be as difficult as cultivating a non-native species from--oh, say—Southeast Asia.  We are all non-native species here.  My friend Gilda and I—non-native girls from the north—stretch out our limbs and thrive in the lush warmth of this place.  We love our orchids, staghorn ferns, and massive tropical plants, none of which would even dream of growing where we came from.

At the halfway point on our daily walk, there’s a towering sea grape–like tree that bears blossoms.  We stop and admire it every time we walk.  One morning, the man who lives across the street ran out and said, “Ladies, every morning you stop and stick your heads in that damn bush.  What are you doing?”  Now we are the Cult of the Bush-Head Ladies.  

A large part of that tree’s beauty, and the reason why Gilda and I became fascinated with it and ended up becoming the Cult of the Bush-Head Ladies in the first place, is its flowers.  They are like hibiscus, so lovely that you feel tempted to tuck one behind your ear and fashion a lei of them.  Yellow with an intense purple heart at their center.  But, wait, are they crimson? At first we think there are two different plants intertwining here, their blooms coexisting.    

One day it dawns on us that this is all one living thing.  Our tree has multicolored flowers.  Some are yellow with purple centers; others are so fiercely crimson that they seem to burn themselves out before falling to the ground.  Yet they are all part of one great tree, individuals joined by their mutual connection to life.  

One of the neighbors thinks the tree is a sea grape because of its large rounded leaves and its size.  I love sea grapes.  They grow invasively in this part of Florida and line Route 1 all the way down through the Keys.   

But no sea grape has flowers like these; they have “grapes” instead, from which jelly can be made. And our tree has heart-shaped, pointed leaves, not rounded, like those of sea grapes.  

It takes hours of web research to discover that this isn’t a sea grape at all, but a sea hibiscus.  Its signature trait is that, year round, it blooms yellow in the morning, its flowers gradually deepen in hue throughout the day, and then they fall to the earth after reaching their deepest crimson.  The plant isn’t local, but native to the Pacific islands, India, and Southeast Asia, where it can be used for dugout canoes, rope, grass skirts, medicines, leis, and food during times of famine.  What a marvelous plant!  Of course, if you’re hungry enough, you'll eat anything, but nevertheless a marvelous plant.

It’s a rare species here, so now there’s nothing for it but to try to grow one of my own.  First, I hack off a branch, bring it home and stick it in a pot, and become dejected when it withers and dies.  

Undeterred, I pull off several seed pods, carry them home, and place them in a paper bag to dry out.  The bag captures the seeds when the pods pop open and release them.  Leaving nothing to chance in this experiment, I soak half the seeds and nick the other half.  I plant them in a mixture of peat moss, perlite, and vermiculite; water them gently; seal their tray into a small greenhouse; and wait.  

Garage sitting

ga∙rage sit∙ting noun \gə-ˈräzh, -ˈräj ‘sit-ting : phenomenon in which people sit on lawn chairs in the shelter of a building or part of a building in which a car, truck, etc., is normally kept

There are front porches up north. People sit on them watching the world go by, smoking outside to keep their houses clean.  If you walk around the neighborhood, you can bet these folks will be out.  They count on passersby to keep life interesting, and they’re a fine source of neighborhood news.

 

“How’s it going, Don?” 

“Can’t complain, hon!  You’re the best thing I’ve seen all week.  You hear Ed died?”

In Florida, many folks have a screen-porch lanai in back, where they can sit outside to smoke and keep their houses clean.  It might even look out on a canal.  But many others don’t have a lanai.

At some point when they began building homes in the South, they omitted the New England front porch, more’s the pity.  This left southerners to their own devices, and garage sitting was born. 

Just like porch sitters, garage sitters gaze out on the street to see the world go by.

One Life at a Time

Inside Boca Grande’s historic train depot, The Loose Caboose restaurant feels cool, smells like sweet cream, and is as richly paneled as any Gilded Age waiting room--which it was until 1958, when the passenger train stopped running. Once the place started dishing up ice cream, Katharine Hepburn adored its chocolate; Laura Bush favors toasted coconut.  Now co-owner Blanche Boudreau is whipping up Indian pudding flavor for some Civil War reenactors, when the cell phone on the counter buzzes.

“We got a call, Blanche,” says chef-owner Jacques Boudreau. 

Blanche doesn’t miss a beat, waves in a helper, picks up the phone. “Where is it? … OK, I’ll be right there.”

When she gets back home, she’ll likely be covered with slime, scrapes, or bird lice from one of her messier jobs—rescuing dogs, wildlife, and, now, humans.

See, “the Loose” has become a means to far more selfless ends than ice cream.

On this wealthy island retreat where even wild sea grapes are manicured like boxwood hedges, the Boudreaus are saving Southwest Florida one life at a time—personally and with spaghetti-and-meatballs benefits.