Key West Connection

Janet likes to tell people, "Bob loves Key West. And I like it." I think she got that attitude during the first time we were here, January 1999 - April 2002, because she wanted me to keep to our agreement, that we'd come for a "few" years and then go back to New Hampshire, or at least, to New England. We did that, spent two more years living in New Hampshire, and came back again in May 2004.  She still tells people that, but with much less enthusiasm than before.

I told Emil at Kate Miano's Sunday evening jazz hours at the Gardens Hotel (every Sunday, 5-7:30 P.M.) that Key West is the only place we've lived that I feel connected to any more. We both grew up in Massachusetts, I in Cambridge and Janet in Lowell. Together we lived mainly in New Hampshire, Salem for twenty-three years, Rochester and Dover, and Manchester for much shorter periods. We also lived a few years in Massachusetts, some years in Pennsylvania, and nearly a year traveling to remote places.  

But that was then and this is now. It's coming up on ten years ago that we got here, although we can only count eight years actually living here. Still, as I told Emil, this feels like home, and I feel connected to it. As Geoffrey Lewis describes it in The Lunch Stop on Celestial Navigations Chapter 2, this is likely just another lunch stop for us, living in the here and now.

We have a vague idea now, that when the time comes to move on again, we'd like to go foreign again, maybe to Italy, or Greece. Whether we do it depends largely on how we feel, how healthy we are, and whether we can afford to do it.  But if and when we do, we'll have left a piece of ourselves here.

As it says on one of Yuri's tiles, (but not on her and Anonio's web site) it's about the journey. Or, as an Afghan proverb has it, "Bloom where you are planted.".