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.

Bee movie

I like most things about Florida, but a lot of them make me itch.

The dogs get poison ivy sap on their claws and inoculate me. 

OFF!® isn’t effective against mosquitoes like small biplanes that leave bites the size of dome lights. 

Fire ants don’t make their presence nearly obvious enough, given how keen they are on guarding their territory.  They bite you before you even know they’re there.  Until now, I’d experienced no itchier bite than that of the black fly—another species that gets you before you know you’re being gotten.  Fire ants are worse.

One day the dachshunds were poking inquisitively at a honeybee.  “No, no, girls!  He bite you,” I chirped, and pulled them out of harm’s way. 

That bee was the least of my worries.

Don't wave at the blind guy

The neighbors see me walking up and down the streets, five miles every day, more than the local sheriff drives around here.  I sure couldn’t have done this year round in New Hampshire.  The neighbors tell me I should join the Neighborhood Watch. 

I still haven’t joined.  Mind you, I don’t have anything against Neighborhood Watches. They’re great. They give the neighbors something to do, they sometimes throw parties with pizza and guest speakers (e.g., local sheriff), they protect your home from vandals, and sometimes they give you a nice banner to hang out front—like the fire brigade signs that told colonial volunteers that a house was “insured.” 

But, I figure, if I see a truck pull up to my neighbor’s house and start uploading electronics, I’ll speak up about it.  Or if a nice, buff young man with a Vermont license plate and a business logo on his truck moves into the rental property next door, I’ll go over and introduce myself.  With homemade cookies.  The Neighborhood Watch lady across the street, somehow taking him to be a squatter, instead calls the cops. Another Neighborhood Watch lady took it upon herself to swat our lawn guy’s truck with a rolled-up newspaper, perhaps thinking this might compel him to move it.  When she escalated to threatening him with the cops, he pulled out his badge and calmly pointed out, “I AM the cops, ma’am.” Like everything else, too much of a good thing can come back to bite you.

While walking around the neighborhood, I wave. This is almost always a good thing. Oncoming cars usually pull politely out of your way when you’re walking.  I think these cars deserve a thank-you wave.