Going To Paradise

I was out on the west facing deck Thanksgiving morning reading the Citizen (new employee housing at Sugarloaf School-controversy! read all about it!!) while my wife prepped breakfast (scrambled eggs, polenta and fruit salad) when I realised it was Fall once again in the Keys. Not because the tree leaves are gradually changing color, at least some of them.

Prudence is back. Prudence is an elderly single female who occupies a house across the canal, kitti-corner to my tree house. Prudence grew up in New York and carries a loud grating accent to prove it. She has lived in the Keys for decades and is a "character." Unhappily she is a character by virtue of longevity, not because she is at all quirky. Nowadays she spends much of the year away as she is elderly and lives alone when she is in her canal-side house. She stays away during summer, and spends less and less time each year in the Fall and Winter. With her return the peace of our neighborhood is shattered.

So I know its fall in Paradise not when the West Indian almond tree drops its leaves and thoughtfully trickles them across my decks. Its not when my bare feet land thoughtlessly on the West Indian almonds themselves, nuts that my avoir-du-poids cannot begin to crush, not even when smothered entirely by my tender naked foot. No, Fall hits paradise when Prudence's dulcet tones ring across the canal.

Yesterday, mercifully, there were no boats cruising the canal, and this was a mercy because local boaters spend all winter proving they are "old hands" in the neighborhood by yelling greetings to the hard of hearing Prudence, who barks back incomprehension in the stentorian tones of the Bronx. When I used to work nights (by choice, curiously enough) I was frequently dragged back from the arms of the sweet patron of the peaceful hour, as the poet has it,by Prudence carrying on a whispered conversation.

Thanksgiving morning I learned, by virtue of megaphone eavesdropping of plans put in motion for family fun far from snowdrifts. "I'm going to Paradise!" was the call across the canal from one neighbor to Prudence. One could only wish for such luck, on a less charitably inclined day, but all it actually means is that the family will be going to eat at Parrotdise, a local restaurant who's offerings are washed down by Big Pecker Parrot wines, which gives an idea of how they grill blacken and fry their fish. Non vintage, I 'm sure.

Prudence brings a smile to my lips when she bawls out a greeting or a comment on the vegetative growth in a friend's garden. She is a symbol of the village-like nature of life in the Lower Keys, of a time when people really did care about their neighbors, not just out of benevolence perhaps, but out of boredom when the news was constant and neighborliness was part of the local tree of gossip. I will miss her bawled banalties when they are silenced by the passage of time. Life in the keys makes one grateful for the weirdest things.