Just Thinking

Memory of this seventy-degree early December predawn, foggy with water dripping from the trees, may be comforting thirty and sixty days from now if January and February bring bitter chill. In our years of living many places, we’ve met grownups who’d never been out of the county, or a hundred miles from home. Granted, if it’s Franklin County, Florida’s Last Frontier and land of oysters, mullet, shrimp, river fishing and hunting camps, and kind, generous people in a culture and place that bring to mind a previous century, there’s no reason to go looking elsewhere. We’ve lived more than a dozen places though, and enjoyed early morning coffee looking out on deep, fresh snow stretching down to a frozen creek; trees that brilliant with color in autumn, suddenly black against a gray winter sky, slowly became light green in the springtime, and greener and greener. To the point, a chilly December would not have been unwelcome this morning.

Mandela in the news and nearly two dozen heads of state heading to his funeral, including American president with a handful of former presidents, Kim Jong-Un’s uncle sacked, shades of Kremlin intrigue fifty years ago, big storm dumps snow and threatens Monday commute across the Northeast, ...

Wait, say that again? "Big storm dumps snow and threatens Monday commute across the Northeast." OK, shifting from romantic to realistic, BTDT, scraped ice from windshields of my cars, shoveled twenty inches of snow from my driveways to get out and drive to work, hour commutes in angry traffic, arriving home after early dark many evenings. If I had to live one of those places again, where? Let me think.

Creekside on the Conodoguinet in Pennsylvania. Yokohama high on the hill overlooking Tokyo Bay. San Diego maybe. For sure on Narragansett Bay in Newport, Rhode Island when you could hear the channel marker bell all night then the whistle announcing the ferry's first early morning crossing to Jamestown, pick up lunch at Mac's Clam Shack and for supper climb up on a vat and select your lobsters at a dollar a pound. Mayport, Florida again, Neptune Beach where we lived a block from the Atlantic Ocean. Apalachicola?

Thinking. Give me a minute.