This a probability chart with the probability of heavy winds and rain highest where the colors are darkest red and brown and then yellow and least probable is green. Were I in New Orleans I would be gassing up the car especially in light of the recent news that the levees are nowhere near strong enough to keep the waters back in the event of another Category Three strike. If I were in Central and Northern Florida I would be wondering where any and all water from Tropical Storm Hanna would be going to go. Their living rooms again? Perhaps Atlanta will soon be out of its long held drought status. And the Keys? We shall see but I think it's time I took my camera to the grotto at St Mary's. Jimmy Buffett was right as usual, I see no way to reason with this lot. Duck and cover.
We are baking in summer's heat, and I like it. This is the weather people take time and pleasure to tell you about when they learn you live in Florida. Too hot- too humid are the words that spring to their lips as though they are imparting profound knowledge that should come as a surprise. The secret is to live on the water and usually there is a little breeze blowing. The other secret is to have a home compact enough to make it easy to keep the air conditioning on to offer a humidity free haven.
The sun is relentless, pretty much all year round in Florida, but in August and September the accumulated heat is thrown back up at you from the ground, and the ocean is simmering nicely at 80 or more degrees.
From what I've heard it is hotter and even more humid in parts of the Midwest where snowbirds go to spend summers with their families Up North. We are told summers in Florida are too hot which is why people migrate, and good for them, say I. I'll take the relentless heat and peace of long quiet summers. More or less quiet if storms stay away.
This is the time of year in the Florida Keys when tourists speak foreign and the breeze dies down and instead of an Overseas Highway we have an over-the-mirror highway, the waters as smooth as glass and uninterrupted by families boating, or rippled by the winds of Spring.
The power lines north of Stock Island stand out stark, like dead trees as they march off to the East to power Key Haven homes across the water. A closer look will confirm these are an elaborate over-the-water way to deliver power round the islands: 
A recent letter writer to the Key West Citizen repeated the tired old phrase "The quality of life just doesn't exist here anymore." And the tired old Conch is right- things have changed over the past decades. She is going back to Central Florida after failing to find work here in her original home town. But what Sharon Pierce failed to recognize in her lament to the newspaper, is that everyplace else has changed too, including no doubt the wooded paradise she fled to the first time she left her home town of Key West. Some things don't change:
And some things do change a lot. I have read lamentations in the 1912 newspaper about how the trains would ruin the island's backwater peace and quiet. More angry letters to the Editor came with the proposal to build a continuous roadway through the islands in 1938, about the time the sainted Ernest Hemingway upped sticks and buggered off to Cuba. Sharon Pierce laments "the smell of urine in the grocery parking lot," and she says Up North "fuel, utility and rents are less expensive" and so she packs her bags a second time and goes back to her relatively affordable mortgage and a urine-free life away from where she grew up in Paradise.
She's right of course, but these issues aren't new. It is expensive to live in the Keys but that's because it's worth it for some of us. I like living here in a way I've never enjoyed living anywhere, yet when I came here in 1981 there was nothing to keep me. I was 23 and looking for adventure and a tired little fishing village at the wrong end of a very slow narrow road wasn't my idea of ambitious paradise:
It took five torturous hours to reach the metropolis of Miami on this old road, and in those days Miami wasn't much, a retirement community of feeble restaurants and tired pensioners. I chose San Francisco as the metropolis I wanted to hover around when i was young and busy. I came from a backwater and i wanted bright lights. The fact is, now that I'm over the hill I too would like to get back the sleepy little fishing village Key West once was, but my age and Key West's stages of development aren't in sync, so I put up with the changes and the development and the endless bitching because this is as good as it gets:
In twenty years, after I'm dead, there will still be disaffected refugees lamenting and looking back at the turn of the century as the "good old days" and they will be right. These are the good old days and it's up to each of us to recognize that in our own lives. I look back at the past fifteen years and it seems to me now, as it did at he time, that we were living in a golden era of easy money and wild credit, just like the 1920s. Right now we are paying the price of credit driven affluence combined with uncertainty about global climate changes and ironically enough uncertain sources of supply for our cheap energy demands. we gotta get down that wide new highway...
A lot of people hate driving the Overseas Highway but to me it is a delight. I am a child of the internal combustion era, I grew up with engines and took full advantage of the ability to ride and move and be truly independent, at a time when even cheap gas seemed expensive to a young man with a motorcycle and yearnings for whatever was beyond the horizon. The Florida Keys have benefited immensely from the Internet, Satellite connections (radio for me TV for everyone else it seems) and bar codes and mail order delivery. My Internet cable broke disabling my laptop but Bell South got me a new one in two days. Free. That's life in the modern Keys, out on a limb but always in touch.
Sharon Pierce writes that despite her qualifications, recommendations and applications not one person even spoke to her about a job. That's because she missed the bus. Had Ms Pierce applied three or four years ago Ms Pierce could have had almost any job for the asking. Sure property values were higher and it wasn't any easier to live here then but those of us that held down boring jobs (not real estate, not bar tending) were worked half to death thanks to the number of unfilled positions there were throughout the city and the county. Now the party is over and the easy money is gone, and these boring civil service jobs have become our lifeline in a community without industry. My wife is sifting through thirteen well qualified applicants for a half time job (with benefits) in her old classroom. Three years ago she couldn't keep an assistant. One memorable successful applicant quit after three months because the four mile commute from Old Town was "too far."
My wife and I can afford to live here because we both work and take our jobs seriously. We show up on time and do what needs to be done, just like millions of Americans everywhere. We don't get toasted on 
Its a truism about the Keys, some people settle here and others can't stand it. It's almost as though the place is the selection committee and the Keys reject some applicants. For others the Keys are a great adventure to look back on when they are settled down in Real Life elsewhere, and bless 'em for coming. And the visitors too, the people 
I have no illusions, a medical crisis, a job lost, a storm that flattens my house, all or any of those catastrophes could kill this pleasant life. In the meantime I propose to keep on keeping on and enjoy the sunsets, not perhaps from Mallory Square but from my own angles, on the road (in the car! Gasp!!):
Or from my back porch: 
Wherever you are whatever you are doing, may your sunsets be memorable. Every day.