If you get out of bed early enough you too can see the seven o'clock sunrise.
Cool breezes are blowing as usual in the Spring but skies have been cloudy too just like the moisture laden summer months. What makes it fabulous is that I get to walk around behind Rusty, under interesting skies and not all sweaty and wet.
My work is overwhelming at the moment, endless days of showing up to answer 911 as staffing levels are dropping too low to permit much time off. It happens periodically in Key West but it hasn't been this bad for a decade and I'm 63 now so my resistance to sitting up all day juggling phones calls is less than it was when I was a stripling a mere half century old.
To walk Rusty and enjoy the colors feels like a vacation in and of itself, a time away, surrounded by silence.
The van is sitting in the drive waiting for another outing. These days I find myself sitting in it reading a book with the doors thrown open and Rusty sitting outside, like a child in a tree house pretending I'm somewhere away.
And then there's the reality check: the really nice portapotty I found online has developed a slight leak in the single spot where it could possibly develop a leak. A new one is in the mail.
I don't mind dealing with our portable toilet, it's one of the weird quirks of my character that dealing with it doesn't bother me. Dealing with broken stuff is annoying but in this modern life an $80 toilet is easily replaced with a type getting better consumer reviews...so we do.
I'm not Webb Chiles, an aficionado of ultimate simplicity, and even though my wife thought a model that uses a gussied up bucket might work. I nixed that over her protests on the grounds that it would get tiresome. I am traveling with a woman after all and she will lose patience with too crude of a set up no matter what she says right now.
It's funny though how life looks so serene and colorful and a modest leak can perform all the functions of a fly in a jar of ointment. I took the toilet fiasco as a reminder that either I have chosen an excessively simple route that might involve breakdowns, or my choice of camping toilet may be inspired inasmuch as there is no plumbing and all can be fixed with no effort and not much expense. I'll bet boating stores in Buenos Aires will sell me portapotties should the need arise at some future date. I anticipate future breakdowns on the road and might even have to fall back on a bucket in a crisis. My van could accommodate such a downgrade easily.
Meanwhile the world continues to spin, summer approaches and they talk already of an active hurricane season. Of course no one can venture a guess where the hurricanes might go if they even materialize in vast numbers this summer. The Keys could of course be targeted.
I had nurtured a slight hope I could escape hurricane duty this year after sitting through every single storm since 2004 but our numbers are so few I'm not sure I can be exempted this year. I'd prefer an evacuation in the van with himself and herself into the mountains and let someone else eat Chef Boyardee in the wreckage. Hurricane Irma was quite the appropriate storm to take its's place as my last hurricane experience thank you.
As it is summer will come inevitably and rain and clouds and humidity will follow of course. I see in Europe there is much excitement about re-opening the continent to summer travel and normal lives.
I feel lucky to have not been deprived of these views and these walks.
This is where I come to escape work and stress and endless hours immersion in life lived by stress. Without these socially distanced walks I don't know how I would have coped.
Or how he would have coped. As it is he too is enjoyed the cool breezes and the last gasp of high energy before summer's heat locks us down.
