For the last few days we have been working busily getting ready for another round of friends to arrive for a visit. That means some heavy pruning, sewing a few new cushion covers for the picnic table benches, and some meal planning. Having more guests arriving makes me think back to our last friends who were here for the holidays. Nobody in the next group has ever been here before. The other friends have been here four or five times already. You would think that with hearing all of our stories about what we do all day here on island coupled with multiple personal experiences they have had here with us, the seasoned visitors would have a pretty clear picture of what it’s like here. Not necessarily so.
Of course, our guests are here on vacation, and we, in turn, interrupt our normal routine to play ‘vacationers’ with our guests. We stock up the fridge and the wine cooler. We go out for dinner and drinks, and we hang at the beach. Having visitors is a good thing that way. We do relaxing and restful and touristy things when they are here. And we did that with these friends – except for one day.
We had decided to stay in on New Year’s Eve. So we needed to go to the grocery store for maybe 7 items to make a nice celebratory dinner. No big deal. In Denver, they would bop over to Whole Foods, check off their list and be back home before the ice thawed off of the edges of the windshield. We went to the first store. We found 4 items. We piled back into the car. We went to the next store. We found 2 more items. We piled back into the car but with a smidge less enthusiasm. At the third store, the frustration was clearly building. Still no shallots. Then the moment of truth. How important are shallots, really? Important enough to warrant driving to a fourth store? A fifth?
Michael is pretty picky about his culinary arts. For him, there is no substitute for a shallot. It may well be that a shallot is sort of a cross between an onion and a garlic, however, a shallot is neither an onion nor a garlic. Under other circumstances, Michael most likely would have stood firm and driven to every store on the island to find a shallot. Or he would have rethought his entire dinner menu to work around the unforgivable lack of shallots. We had to consider our guests, however, so I drew the proverbial line in the sand and insisted that we give up (gasp) and return home.
Nobody passed out from shopping exhaustion, we managed to enjoy the meal in spite of the hardship, and we still had days to go beach to quell our disappointment. One of those days I dropped the three of them at the beach, did some chores alone, and then returned to join them. The guys were off walking the shore solving the problems of the world. So I joined my friend under her umbrella. The group had rented two umbrellas and four chairs, but to start with I just sat on the sand next to her to chat. The waves were rough and were coming nearly up to the chairs. The umbrella guy, though, had assured them that the tide was receding and that they’d be fine where they were.
When I arrived, he followed me in the hopes that I needed to rent my own beach furniture. While we were all chatting, we mentioned again that we were concerned that the waves were coming very close. He laughed and assured us that there was absolutely no risk of the water advancing any further. Then to emphasize his confidence in his prediction, he drew the literal line in the sand beyond which he swore the water would not come. And there it was: that moment of truth. And you could almost hear the sea laughing in the sound of the next wave breaking as the water came not only over that line but over his ankles and under my ass and all the way up past the chairs.
And the comedy and the irony and the symbolism were just too funny. Do you know that the word humor derives from the latin word umor which mean fluid? It makes for a good metaphor for island life because here, surrounded by water with so many little things beyond your control (from the availability of shallots to the whims of the sea) you have to be fluid. You have to go with the flow. You just have to laugh.
