Forget the farm projects…………..the girls and I went to an obscure, little beach on the Gulf.  As Floridians, this hardly ever happens.

 

 

We never go to the beach.

How novel.  How hot.  How sunny…………………how very, very sandy!……………..Geez, August in Florida———who would think!?!

 

My shoulders are that old, familiarly “sparkly” feeling which means I should’ve (didn’t) use sunblock. My hair’s too gray now to consider “Sun-In Hair Highlighter” anymore,  HA!……………it was a wonderful product for “real” blondes and it served me well for decades…………..but I am now laying down that “natural blonde” gauntlet for other semi-brunettes to pick up and take forward.  Now, I am a real-authentic gray…………………really, really, nasty gray……………….

Let me check for a moment to see if I care………………………………hmmmmmmmmm—–nope, still don’t care.  Not one iota.

Plus, I didn’t even care that I wasn’t holding in my stomach.  Not one bit!  It was great!  A svelte, well-tailored body is not my lead-point these days.  Water is so forgiving and buoyant.

We made a pit-stop at a local Winn-Dixie, not our Winn-Dixie.  This one had angry employees……………not sure why.  We weren’t the catalyst though, we were just buying junk food.  No one is unhappy when they are buying junk food.  But with the necessary bag of ice, we were on our way.

Like I said an itty-bitty beach.  The access-road wasn’t well marked. High-tide even encroached on the pavement margins on both sides of the road———that was how narrow this DOT-approved, access “path” was to this spit of land.  Really neat.  Mangroves everywhere.

Apparently (as I later found out from my husband with his criminal-legal background) “this” beach has/had its private, sordid history……………………..well, not on this day anyway.  Just the comings and goings of a handful of revolving old people, old boom-boxes, Walmart hammocks tied to palm trees, and junk food………………junk food unites us all.  We liked it because it was small, secluded, limited-parking, and fairly hard to find…………………..come to think of it……………..ALL the hallmarks necessary for its quirky history.

Well, along with me and the other potential gray-panthers…………………..we took the beach on this day!  Without any obvious opposition………………boom-boxes a-blair with Muskrat Sally & Muskrat Sam.  So many, leathery-bronzed, native geriatrics.  There were tanned, wrinkled, scantilly-clad bodies everywhere.  I’m sure if you stood them all on their heads after so many years (who am I kidding), decades in the sun———there would be glaringly, white-striped inner-folds exposed to sunlight probably for the first time in forever………………….or at least since their late teens.

Both my daughters inherited the milk-bottle-tan-ability from their father’s British Isles heritage.  I apparently come from easily-tanned stock———you know, the ones just south of the Great Lakes that separate the United States from Canada (?)  I don’t get it.

My daughter has since researched spray-on sun-block and has procured a case of it (when was that developed?—–I remember the old-style, toothpaste-tube stuff)…………………….it was so easy to see the body parts that she had missed!  Wow———I didn’t think that there could be that extreme and bright a contrast between glaring-white and pulsating-red!  Poor thing.  Sad calf muscles.  So bright.

We’ll go back.  I’m sure.  As the summer wanes and the heat subsides.  Just reading in a hammock that’s suspended between two palms, sounds like a pretty good idea.  I had forgotten just how therapeutic the salt air smelled (even at low tide) and the sound of the water too.

I like this poor, little sad beach with its sordid past of bad decisions.  I want to make it our very own.  I want to hug it and squeeze it, and make it a happy beach again………………………..besides with the advent of smart phones (even though I don’t have one, both my girls do), all that is necessary is taking a few  photos of blurred, running individuals.  Anonymous sprinters (hoping their faces are not identifiable or in-focus) are unlikely to return…………………..I’m not worried.  Besides, I am always packing, and I have a post-menopausal attitude.

This could just turn into a fun, little jaunt.  But, I would pick a different tune other than Muskrat Sally & Muskrat Sam………………………