Mexico Beach

 That was a fast two weeks.  Last I wrote the shed was gone.  Now all the 30 years worth of "do something with it someday" stuff propped behind the barn is gone.  The old riding lawnmower and the chipper mulcher that may or may not work.

I got a few things planted in the garden - tomatoes, pepper, herbs, cotton and indigo.  The hummingbirds are back, so I'm keeping the feeder filled and often sit on the back deck (as I am doing now) so I can watch the tiny birds come to feed.  We had a few days of good weather - meaning not raining but not windy - so I got a lot of yard trash burned off.

Time marches on.

Yesterday was Easter so I went down to Mexico Beach to spend it with Della, Don, Amanda, Rob, Dane, Zeke, and Dane's friend Yesse.

Mexico Beach makes me sad.  We started going there in 1972, when Bob's parents were thinking about buying property there.  It was a small town (population around 2,000), old, a big grungy.  Sometimes called "The Mayberry of the South."  A lot of the houses were 2-bedroom, 1 bath cinderblock.  

Hurricane Michael wiped it out in October 2018.  All that could be done was bring in the bulldozers and clear off the rubble of what used to be the town (90% of the town was destroyed; Della's house was standing but had to be gutted and rebuilt).  Most of the old-time residents left - they didn't have enough insurance on those old homes to rebuild to current requirements and investors were swooping in with ridiculous amounts of money to buy up the lots.  Now the place is filled with brand-new houses - summer homes and investment rentals - in bright "Florida" Palm Beach colors, and there's no small-town charm.

After our Easter dinner the kids all wanted to go down to the beach to go swimming and I walked down with them.  The ocean was other-worldly beautiful.  There was some bad weather thinking about coming in, so the sky was heavy and overcast - but between the clouds and the ocean it was clear turquoise.  The water was steel grey and the waves crashing.  The kids went swimming and I walked down the beach.

And all the feelings and memories came crashing in with the waves.  1972 - not even married, we came with his parents, looking for their retirement property.  It was a cold day in March; Bob was wearing his field jacket.  But Della, young teen that she was, laid down on a blanket on the beach in her swimsuit, trying to shiver herself into a tan.  Bob, doing the proper duty of a Big Brother, grabbed her and was dragging her screaming to throw her in the water.  He suddenly felt the massive jaws of the family's Great Dane close on his arm and he was pulled off his feet - and then covered in slobberyy dog kisses as Sam recognized him.

We lived there for a year in 1981, in the half-built house that his father was working on, after Bob got out of the military, medical discharge, and we were sending out job feelers and waiting on a military settlement (that never came).  We had part-time jobs, spent time working on the house, walked the beach, had a little garden.  Bob would help out on tourist fishing boats and bring home unwanted fish (white snapper is as delicious as red, but there's no market for it).  We'd go down to the beach to gather buckets of tiny coquinas, which are too tiny to eat but when boiled yield a heavenly broth for chowder.  We participated in town activities (we realized that maybe we'd been there too long when we realized that we were looking forward to the ghost crab races in the parking lot of the 7/11)

Somewhere in the back of a drawer I have a pair of tiny red satin shorts with "Mexico Beach" written on them.  Money was pretty tight - but I wanted those shorts.   Bob made me a deal; I could get them if I would go skinny-dipping in the middle of the day.  Well - I wanted them.  So we went swimming, and I pulled off my bikini - he insisted on me handing it to him to prove that I was out of it.  The, of course, he swam back to shore with it.  Mexico Beach hadn't been "discovered" by then, but there were still other people on the beach.  Eventually he felt sorry for me, swam out to return my suit, and I got my shorts.

After a year we decided that it was time to grow up and we moved to Tallahassee.  His parents retired to Mexico Beach so visits were common.

So many memories.    And as I was strolling, it hit me that this was the first time I had been down on the beach since I lost him.  So many hundreds of walks down that exact stretch of beach.  I could hear the kids laughing in the water.  I wanted to cry, to sit on the sand with my arms around my legs, hold myself.  I looked out over the water - somewhere out there was Bob's reef.  I felt "the call of the void" - that urge to wade out, start swimming, go find my way to him.  But it's not my time yet.

I somehow kept my act together.  We went back to the house, had dessert, made my goodbyes, and headed home.  It's a long drive - about 1 1/2 hours - and boring.  While I do prefer it to highway driving (or, heaven forbid, interstate), or the stop-and-go of in town driving, there are several stretches of 30-some miles with pretty much nothing.  And it started raining hard - matching the tears that I just let drip out of my eyes.  At least I insisted on leaving in time to get home before it got too dark.  There had been many times in the past, visiting his parents, and his Dad would want help with "just one more thing" and we'd end up making that long drive in the dark.  And, being Florida, often in the pouring rain.  But sometimes, on those drives, if a hard belt of rain came through, we'd pull over to wait it out and, what the heck - you have to kill the time somehow - make out for awhile.   Not this trip.