My wife and I are moving to Tur Del Fur. Not entirely, and not exactly, but she’s already there and I’m leaving to join her today. Truth is we bought a house in Old Town Key West, and if my last novel, Drumindor were to be made into a movie, Key West is where they should film it. Truthfully, the architecture would be all wrong, and the time period completely off, but the essence, the spirit, and the feel are a perfect match. To a large degree, Key West was my inspiration for the setting of that novel: independent, artistic, freewheeling, and a culturally diverse city of Tur Del Fur where Ghazel, Dromeians, and Fhrey bumped elbows without a thought – a happy place, a unique watering hole where lions and antelope drink side-by-side in a tranquil paradise.
I said we aren’t moving entirely because we are keeping the cabin in Shenandoah, and will return to it in the summers. This will make us “snow birds” a term for lucky old people who have the means and the wisdom to understand why birds naturally.
You see, Robin — she’s my wife, and I feel silly explaining that because most know her by now, and she’s certainly more beloved—suffers from the winter blues. She becomes depressed when the leaves fall, spirals downward when we “close up the pool,” and it gets worse as days shorten and grow colder. We don’t know if it is a true case of seasonal affective disorder (SAD), or not, but it happens each year and appears to grow more pronounced with age. Even I’ve started to feel it. Short, dark, cold days have a way of making a person focus on that unpleasant topic we all prefer to not think about—how few years you have left. Less years, more focus, greater morbidity in winter.
Over the years, we’ve traveled to the Keys for at least a week in various winters. I even did a blog post in March of 2019 about how we’d take the auto train down to Orlando, then jump in our Jeep and drive the rest of the way to the islands. The trips clearly helped, so this last November we tried an experiment. Sure, it’s fine for a week, for a vacation, but how would it be to live there? For a test we rented a house for six weeks in the Old Town section of Key West.
For those of you who don’t know, Key West is the last inhabited island at the end of the overseas highway. A 113-mile stretch of road that connects more than 40 small islands utilizing 42 bridges including one that is 7 miles long. The island itself is quite small just 4.2 square miles (approximately 4 miles long and 1 mile wide). In 1829 it was even smaller than that (just 2.5 square miles but it’s been “added onto” over the years the biggest project of which happened during the 1950’s and 1960’s.
Key west also has the distinction of being the southernmost point in the contiguous United States. It is closer to Cuba than Miami, and it has a tropical climate. The surrounding water tends to mitigate huge temperature swings keeping it mild for most of the year, and it enjoys 300 days a year of sunshine. It really doesn’t get cold there; it’s record low was set in 1886 (41 degrees F), and I have been told it is the only place in the continental United States that you can drive to that has never known frost.
As you might imagine, the island is quite crowded there are about 3000 buildings many of which date back to the 1800’s; it looks like Main Street Disneyland if Walt had decided on a tropical garden theme.
After our six weeks, we discovered that we loved it. The bad news (as you might have already guessed) is that we loved it.
You see, Key West is not cheap.
A realtor showed us a house with a separate building that was being rented to a ship’s captain. It was one room with a low ceiling, no windows or running water, (there was an outdoor shower and toilet nearby). I think it must have been about 10 feet by 15 feet, and the captain paid $2000 a month in rent! But it’s not just the cost of housing that’s expensive there. Since so much is brought in by the Overseas Highway, or by boat, most things are pricey. Living is Key West these days was a crazy (and we thought) unobtainable dream.
But a funny thing happened over the last two decades. A lot of people bought my books. And because Robin and I grew up poor, we never spent very much of that money. And as the shorter, darker days keep reminding us, we don’t have that many years left. So we bought a little piece of paradise.
We closed on a little yellow shipwright cottage in “the Meadows” at the start of February. No not the one I described above. The “house hunt” was an adventure in its own right, and maybe Robin will post about it. The plan was for Robin to go down, get things “setup” and then I would follow soon after. Little did we know that Virginia (and a wide swath of the east) was inundated with snow and crippled by seriously cold temperature turned the “white stuff” surrounding our place into “snowcrete (a new Virginia term for really thick and immovable ice).
In early February, we were like borrowing field mice not peaking our heads out of the cabin at all, but we did have to get the closing papers notarized so we took a trip to do that. While I parked the car, Robin walked toward the cabin and went down hard. I rushed after to help, and fell as well. The result was an acute transverse fracture through the surgical neck of the proximal humerus extending into the greater tuberosity. In other word, she fractured her upper arm where the ball of the bone sits in the shoulder.
The prognosis of her arm wasn’t great, but the weather predictions were worse. Temperatures were going to be below freezing for weeks so none of the snow was going to melt. To make matters worse another huge storm just came through south of us so travel through that area was “dicey.” Now, anyone who knows Robin knows that she is not one to be daunted. If you put obsticles in her way she’s going to go around, over, or under them so she threaded a needle found a few days when setting out might be possible and so I loaded up the Jeep with essentials that had to go by car (including or cat Loki), and she and our daughter Sarah set out.
So, she’s been down there these last five weeks. Winged as she was, there wasn’t a lot that she could do, but Lorian (my co-author for After the Fall), and her husband came down to help. Sarah was able to stay for a few days, and one of our oldest and dearest friends, Cheryl, came to the rescue. So she’s not been alone for the entire time -thank Maribor.
This is the longest the two of us have been apart in forty-six years by a margin of four weeks. It hasn’t been pleasant. We honestly like each other’s company (something our daughter refers to as co-dependency).
I’ve stayed in the cabin working to finish the third book of the Cycle, because I didn’t have an office at the new place yet, and I didn’t want to stop while I was “on a roll.” Alone in the snowbound Shenandoah Valley, in the short, dark, cold days I thought I could get a lot done, and I have, but it has been miserable. Not nearly as nice as Stephen King made it out to be in The Shining. I didn’t have a helpful ghostly bartender to cheer me up.
I don’t watch much television, but I started to when night fell as that’s when I noticed Robin’s absence the most. The late lonely hours are especially nasty and get worse as you get older. So, I watched a Ken Burns special on Hemingway, about how he killed himself in a remote cabin. I followed this up with the new Michael Caine movie Bestseller about an aging writer at the end of his life who credits his wife with making his career by her wonderful editing, but who passed away and now everything is bullshiite (an actual word used in the film.) As you might imagine, neither of these helped. No, not at all.
The phone has been our lifeline. We talk almost every night (exceptions held for when people were visting). Maybe that’s what denied me my rightful bartender, I don’t know. What made it bearable was how happy she sounded. In some weird way, it was like she was dead, and I was making phone calls to heaven. I was either still alive or in hell. I’m not sure which. These days it’s hard to tell the difference.
But the book is done. The snow is gone. I have a backpack filled with my notebooks, iPad, a portable hard drive, and a plane ticket. And in 15 minutes my plane will be boarding, so I’m going to see my wife in paradise.
If my plane crashes, this post is going to sound weirdly prophetic. But for now my fingers are crossed.