Jed Wolf

The couple who bought the house behind us with “armies of nieces and nephews,” finally finished building their pool. “For the grandkids, hopefully by this summer or at least before they’re off to college,” Chrissy from Long Island squawked, complaining about St. Augustine’s drug-addled workforce. Though their firepit and patios are still unfinished and masonry sawdust periodically billows over our shared fence at odd times, the sound of screaming children has begun.

Most people avoid talking politics in paradise. When he’s not flying around on business, our neighbor to the right from Georgia watches Sunday football on his weatherproof big-screen TV mounted on top of our shared 6 six-foot cinderblock wall. While he’s gone, meditative new age soundtracks breath from behind it disclosing the presence of his poolside wife, Sacagawea.

The neighbors on the other side rent their place. Other than a few slammed doors, loud conversations and yapping dogs, sooner or later lodgers leave.

Dave and I and our kitties have gradually adjusted to weekends in this Florida tourist town. No longer startled from cannon fire reenactments at the Castillo, we rather enjoy the mix of cover bands and mufflers wafting across the intercoastal well past midnight. We finally have our own back porch big screen and though we’ve been known to increase Downton Abbey’s volume to hear sarcastic Maggie Smith above sunset helicopters, tree frogs and touchdowns, other than notoriously loud TV music, dialog blends with sea breezes and clattering palms. We’re careful to mute gunshots, gruesome murder, and the blaring bagpiped love theme from Outlander upon the first note.

It’s never pin-drop quiet this near the roaring ocean in a town like this except at a windless low tide just before dawn in-between distant shrieks of Fountain of Youth Park peacocks while a tired moon longs to set. Though continuous breakers in a steady gale can cancel out Margaritaville and its A1A Harleys, on this end of the island, nothing mutes my worries about things beyond my control.

Gardening would be enhanced in our shady backyard beneath the broiling Florida sun without my iPhone continuously droning on about the January 6th hearings. Far worse than occasional odor of someone’s slightly “off” barbecue meat, Dave acts annoyed by politics, though neither of us can keep our heads in the sand for long even while listening to Mozart.

With few natural interruptions, contiguous neighborhoods surrounding coastal cities and tourist towns like ours extend from Maine to Texas where approximately 150 million people live in close quarters. I mute Liz Cheney to wave at dog walkers while pulling weeds in my front yard and try not to gawk at the parade of tourists seemingly “living it up” while they still can. “Is it just me?” I wonder, but noticing the recent spate of couples scowling on scooters and local service people angrily racing around, I realize it isn’t. Everyone looks similarly nervous including the dogs.

Though I did for over a decade, I quit singing in nursing homes over two years ago. Rather than being rewarding or filling a need, singing love songs to demented seniors locked away among low-paid, under-appreciated employees of a trillion-dollar industry finally freaked me out. Our entire culture needs rehab, I thought back then, not just seniors and the last thing anyone needs is to be further mesmerized by higher quality entertainment as Dave and I rather than going for sunset walks, watch Netflix night after night.

Sacagawea volunteers at a food bank where she collects and distributes expiring food to “have-nots” and homeless though lately, she’s been spending more and more time burned out by her pool. Managing mismanaged groceries from a corrupt capitalist system is Sisyphean, I smugly think awaiting a huge dead live oak limb to split open my skull. Though it’s not exactly like helping Lewis and Clark map the wilderness so settlers can exterminate her people or singing “New York, New York” for drooling shut-ins, “doing good” hasn’t made Sacagawea quit just yet.

Since thrusting my hopelessness deeper into gardening, Sacagawea told me some of the waste food she manages no longer fit for human consumption winds up at the ten-acre animal farm on a significantly pronounced hill outside of town where I collect manure. Ostrich, emus, buffalo, yack and exotic poultry enjoy mismanaged bread and produce which winds up in my compost pile feeding plants and produce I grow.

Everything’s connected which is why understanding and compassion rather than blame make sense, yet without enough like-minded others to create a philosophical sea change, what can any of us do but watch the one percent reserve all the seats on Noah’s arc and hope to serve them endive salads if we’re young and pretty enough.

It felt good to feel attractive again on the hillside among all the animals shoveling shit into five-gallon buckets during mating season as a towering male ostrich eyed me. With a few whacks from my shovel, he got the message and moved off. Only cloven hooves accompanied me and my truck out there today collecting poop on Mt. Ararat.

My truck radio blared under the blazing sun while DeSantis threatened to prevent “ghost flights” of illegal immigrant children from landing in Florida to reunite with their parents.

On my way out of the bumpy pasture, a toothless tattooed woman I’d never seen before with jet black hair, snow-white skin smoking a cigarette held open the gate. As I slid by her Trump-stickered idling muffler-less rusting Dodge with my new Tacoma, she gave my tanned tank topped body a meth-head stare then offered me a nod without eye contact as I passed.

Guilty, undeserving and flattered, I lurched back into traffic, when switching radio stations, Paul Simon’s “Something So Right” came on just before my favorite line.

They’ve got a wall in China,

a thousand miles long,

to keep out the foreigners,

who made it strong.