Ready Or Not
Working in one of my “offices” currently the upstairs front porch on a beautiful if high humidity morning. If it weren’t screened the bugs would get me, not to mention the birds that used to fly through here before we had it screened in. Fly through here, not to mention because they would pause to -- let us say rest -- on the banister railing before moving on.
Passing each other in the channel in the Bay down front at the moment right in front of the house, a tug with barges heading west; and, heading east, another tug pushing a string of barges. The east-headed barges stretch easily a quarter-mile, and if it weren’t so peaceful here I’d get in the car and zip down to the oil tanks and watch to see how the tug boat captain negotiates that hairpin turn that’s just beyond the channel marker off Balboa Avenue.
When we retired from Trinity, Apalachicola we brought several plants with us. Some of that cassia sieberiana that is covered with yellow flowers during the Florida Seafood Festival the first week of November every year. Dug up and brought one of the fig trees my mother gave me years ago, which has done satisfactorily here though it took a long time to regroup and produce figs. Several of my boxwood plants that Linda gave me for birthday or Christmas one year because their aromatic fragrance reminds me of Williamsburg, Virginia on a hot summer day. Cuttings from the loquat tree that was by the front porch of the rectory. The loquat cuttings flourished and gave us lots of fruit here, but the tallest one diseased and started dying the past couple years. Yesterday morning we cut it down. But there are more, thriving.
Loquat, some call it Japanese Plum, carries the Latin name japonica, all of which sounds like it came from Japan though it’s native to China. We first knew loquats in Gainesville. My senior year, 1956-57, Linda’s junior year, she had a room in the University Avenue home of Dr. John Benton’s mother. In her yard was a large, prolific loquat tree. Mrs. Benton was a kind, gracious and generous lady who let us use her parlor for spooning. She also lent us her yellow Studebaker sedan, which she called “my little Champion,” when my ’48 Dodge was giving us trouble. And she had a lake cottage where we went now and then for picnics. One of the women students rooming there was from Pakistan, name slips my mind, but we enjoyed knowing her. If you wanted Mrs. Benton to be cross with you, the best way was to ring the doorbell more than once when you came to call. I was a fast learner, it only took one scolding. On campus there was a Benton Hall classroom building named for John's father Dr. Benton, a University of Florida professor in earlier years.
OK, I see what happened. The tug and barges did not come back in the far channel heading west toward the pass and out into the Gulf. Which means they did not turn after all, they headed on east, under Tyndall Bridge (Dupont Bridge) and on in the intracoastal waterway.
In another life I may work on a tugboat. Or an oceangoing freighter. That will be after my life as a meteorologist and my life as an astronomer. All of which will be after my spirit life riding the western plains in EF5 tornadoes, those mile-wide wedges you see on the horizon during Tornado Week on TV. And coming ashore in 215 mph Category 5 hurricanes: I’ll be the ghost riding that surfboard atop the 60 foot surge.
Life Is Good.
T