I don’t want to always be going on and on about working around the house or doing gardening or replacing and rewiring our own fan motors (which we just did). Those things do keep me from sitting around blogging all the time – either because I don’t have the time, I’m too physically exhausted, or I’m just too aggravated to be wry and witty.
Today, however, was a good day. As is usual, we woke with the sun and had our coffee. I made breakfast which included fresh papayas from our tree, fresh blueberries (which you couldn’t have gotten here to save your soul some years ago) and wonderful, fresh peaches (which you could get before but they always looked deceptively, nice on the outside in spite of inevitably having suffered from a lengthy, ocean transit in a refrigerated container that always left them disappointingly brown and dry and mealy on the inside). So we had coffee and sausage and fresh fruit out on the veranda looking through the palm trees at the Caribbean Sea. That was a pretty good start to the day.
Since I was having my friend, Dianne, over for lunch, I had some preparations to take care of. I made a cold, rice salad of Camargue Red rice, quinoa, pistachios and dried fruits with a citrus vinaigrette to serve with some baked, red snapper in white wine and tarragon. I had some banana cake with ginger lime frosting for dessert and just had to run out to get some vanilla ice cream. There were a few other items on my shopping list but I elected to try the small grocery store that is nearest to us figuring that if they had the ice cream that would be enough. And if they had any of the other five items, I would consider that gravy. Lo and behold, they had everything I wanted just a mile from home. Things were still going very well.
I returned home, worked out, washed some wooden louvered doors that I needed to paint, cleaned up and was ready when Dianne arrived. We had a lovely lunch out on the other end of the veranda overlooking the pool and the Caribbean Sea. (I like to mix it up a bit.) We talked about politics, legalized gay marriage in New York, the Casey Anthony trial, future travels plans, etc….basically lots of things that weren’t issues associated with island life.
After lunch, I painted those louvered doors, swept some leaves off the veranda before they could fall into the swimming pool, and then Michael and I went down to check the beach. There is a small beach down a short set of steps at the end of our property. Technically our lot is coastal, oceanfront but not beachfront. Before moving to the island I never realized that beaches are dynamic. They come, they go, they shift, and they move. Sometimes ‘our’ beach starts at the edge of our property and extends east. Sometimes out beach runs straight across in front of our house almost all the way to the west. It depends on the direction and the force of the waves at any given time.
In just the last few days the sand has been building up again in front of our house. So we went down to the edge of the rocks to sit on our bench and to assess the current beach situation. We also went to look for ‘Johnson.’ There’s a spotted eagle ray that comes to out beach sometimes to dig in the sand searching for whatever spotted eagle rays search for. We didn’t want to call him ‘Ray’ – as in ‘Michael, I’m going down to the beach to look for Ray’ – thinking that would be too pedestrian. So we took inspiration from Bill Saluga’s old, comedy sketch about Raymond J Johnson, Jr. While that character always said, “Now you can all me Ray, or you can call me J….or you can call me RJJ, Jr….but ya doesn’t hasta call me Johnson!”, Johnson it is.
Anyway, we were sitting on the bench watching the waves crashing against the rocks and enjoying the breeze when who showed up but our little friend, Johnson, with his stark, white underbelly; his big, beaky face; his bright glittering spots; and his lovely, graceful movements – like a big, old diamond just skipping along the sand. Yup, today was a very good day.