Feb 14
My friends Susan and Gilbert from Vermont
took a condo for January-February in Fernandina
Beach, a town in the NE corner of Florida on Amelia Island, right on the Georgia border.
I arrive on Valentine’s Day after a grueling flight that takes me in and out of
redundant time zones, the details of which experience are best left to decay.
Amelia
Island, named for the
daughter of George II, is only 13 by 4 miles. Fernandina
Beach, one of the two towns on the
Island, has a population of under 12,000 and is situated about 25 miles
northeast of Jacksonville,
where I flew into. Fernandina
Beach has a 50-block area
of Victorian homes and buildings on the National Register of Historic Places.
It’s famous for having been held by so many successive
colonial powers, and for its smuggling of slaves north despite the fact that
the slave trade had been abolished, during the period between the 1783 Treaty
of Paris that returned Amelia Island to Spain and 1821 when it became a part of
the USA.
Because both of my hosts are ridiculously good cooks, meals
are a major high during this visit. For dinner, Gilbert broils a delectable steak
and a perfected baked potato and Susan adds two magic salads. Their pampering
goes a long way to chill me out after months of successive deaths in the
fitness classes for elders that I have been teaching for a decade. We have had
a tsunami of dying, after a pretty good run over 10 years, but when people are
in their 80s or thereabout, 10 years makes a big difference. My life – our
lives – have been dominated by visits to hospice and funerals. Last weekend, I
had to brave the aftermath of the blizzard to drive an hour across town to
deliver a memorial for one of our youngest, strongest, most popular students
who, at a robust, handsome 75 got an unexpected diagnosis of cancer and failed
fast.
Feb 15
This morning I join my friends for the second half of their
walk on the beach and it is good to be here in February when one can feel quite
private. Susan points out the pelicans and Gilbert shows me the skimmers, a
black and white type of seagull with a longer, lower bill.
An historically Black beach here was known as American Beach, a 200-acre ocean-front community
established in the 1930s. Although it was a popular vacation spot for
African-Americans, too often barred from white-only beaches, by the 1970s
people had many more choices and it was no longer the only dance in town. There
remains a Black community on Amelia
Island.
Gilbert and I drive into town, both to visit the produce
stand, which features whatever the farmers bring in that day, and to tour the
town. Built around 1850, the wooden houses have gingerbread ornamental porches,
not unlike New Orleans.
It is one of the sweetest towns I have ever seen in the States, with a
decorative color palette and the landscaping of loving hands.
I snap a photo of Kate’s Tree. It’s a massive oak around
which city employees were forced to build a split road, instead of removing it,
when Kate Bailey defended it with her shotgun.
Did I mention the remarkable plethora of second hand and
consignment stores, organized by size and color, all
items spotless and clean?
We make the rounds, starting with Swamp, a combo art/antique store run by two
women, one of whom carves portrait mermaids from driftwood (see above). Thoroughly
remarkable. We continue our shopping – I pick up three items for $5 at the sale
at Buy Gones – until we’re peckish. Tasties is calling. It’s the super-popular
hamburger/fries/beer joint where a burger is $3.50 and fries are $2.
The evening back at the apartment is calm. Gil makes braised
pork, delicious fresh farm corn (in February!), and Susan’s salad. Susan, a
book maker and teacher of bookmaking, shows me the complicated, intricate,
meaningful book she has constructed for the Philadelphia International Festival
of
the Arts in 2013. The Athenaeum collaborated with the Philadelphia Center
for the Book to produce this exhibition and Susan’s multi-media work is a moving
expression of the exhibition’s theme "From Seneca Falls to Philadelphia:
Women of the Centennial."
This vacation is going to be filled with art. Both friends
agree to read the short stories in the collection I’m working on – giving me
valuable, informed feedback, and when they retire early, I follow soon after, taking
with me for reading the first chapters of a memoir that Gil is writing about
his harrowing, courageous youth.
Feb 16
I’m the first awake and I use the time to read. I’m
recognizing that despite my best intentions, this is going to be a vacation,
not a writing retreat. That’s okay because I have been needing to relax,
desperately, and what could be more therapeutic than hanging out with dear
friends and eating their fine food in this fab setting.
I’m always reluctant to go walking – I have a particular
strong laziness that way. I could dance salsa or swing or cha-cha all night
long; I teach fitness to at least four classes each week; winning an Olympic
medal for my trampoline expertise is at the top of my bucket list. But I’ll do
a lot to avoid mounting a single flight of steps or walking two blocks.
However, today we go to Egan’s Creek Greenway, a public park
with a path along huge marshes (Susan calls them “the lungs of the sea”) at
high tide, and I walk for two miles. The white egrets are huge and graceful.
The blue heron (left) standing so close to the path is not fazed as I photograph
him/her. The ospreys soar super-high. And I’m with friends who know one from
the other. We don’t go down the path where they ran into an alligator last
year, but Gil teaches me that I should approach one boldly, pet its head with
one hand while kicking directly at the teeth. Right.
I’m most mesmerized by the Spanish moss, something I have
always found magically ethereal the few times I’ve been near it. Tomorrow
they’ll take me to the part of the park where the moss is even more prominent.
Lunch is a lamb barley soup Susan has somehow whipped up
with a plate of cheeses and baguette, and as always a gorgeous salad. This
comfort food soothes me as I work on one of the newsletters I produce as part
of my professional portfolio. As it were.
We go out to dinner, primped up in the couture we got at the
3-for-$5 sale at Buy Gones, looking smokin’. Susan and Gil have already been to
Espana a few times and so we are greeted as regulars. Susan has her fave: Spicy
Snapper; and Gil and I split a meat paella and a chicken dish with lemon and
garlic. We come home for dessert and they retire at 9:30. I am reading a how-to
book on self-publishing on my Kindle, which you would think would put me right
to sleep, but I find my slumber sketchy at best.
February 17, 2013
It is only 30 degrees, but Susan, always the bravest, goes
for a very long beach
walk nonetheless. Gilbert and I head back to the Greenway, but enter from the
opposite end where he promises me (and delivers) many trees dripping with
Spanish moss, a plant that literally lives on air, or rather on rainfall. It is
too cold for the turtles to be out or even the alligators apparently, but the
birds – egrets and huge storks among them – put on a dazzling show, whether
they are fishing for breakfast, lifting off for a flight, or hanging out with
their buddies.
The afternoon is lazy – I nod out as I persevere with my self-publishing
book – although we stop to nibble the raisin oat cookies Susan makes, in
between her preparations for an eggplant curry for dinner. Tonight is a big
night: we’re going to put the TV on for the first time and Susan and Gil (he,
only reluctantly) and I are going to stay up to watch the Xmas special episode
(ie, in the UK)
of Downton Abbey, a kind of add-on to season 3. While dinner exceeds all
expectations, the show is an absolute dud with the main character Mary being a
shit to her single sister and then on to the predictable death of Mary’s
husband Matthew, shortly after the birth of their newborn– predictable only because
we see him speeding along in a convertible singing and smiling, his white-boy
hair blowing in the wind as a truck approaches. The actor playing this
character wanted out of the show so this quick exit was provided. Julian Fellowes,
the creator, is flirting with NBC over a new series “The Gilded Age,” and
clearly has tired of Downton.
February 18, 2013
Good grief. I wake up to 29 degrees. Thanks, Florida. And then I hear
from Boston
friends who are digging out from 5” of snow and my thanks become sincere. It’s
time to launder the sheets and clean the bathroom and pack my suitcases and
face departure later today.
First we visit the local historical museum, which traces
back to the days when Amelia
Island was inhabited by
the matrilineal and matrilocal Timucua Indians, whose ancestors first came here
in 11,000 B.C.! European disease, warfare, slave trading, and hard labor all
contributed to the demise of the Timucua, I learn from the museum exhibition,
and the last known Timucua left with the Spanish for Cuba in 1764.
I learn too about a Jewish man named David Levy Yulee who
was the first US Senator
from Florida
and the first Jewish Senator. He was also a Confederate who was convicted of
treason and served 10 months in prison. The museum itself was the former county
jail, and we are shown evidence of the racist distinctions in the accommodation
of early prisoners.
We have a last quiet hour at home, reading and writing,
before we set out to the airport. As always, I can’t help but note that my
greatest skill is vacationing and I can’t understand why no one has paid me
professionally to do it full-time.
Except for the archival painting image, I took all photos with my iPhone.
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