Ninety Days
It's a singular experience, living somewhere where almost every person you meet is on vacation.
It's easy to see why they come: from a distance, the islands look like the blue, rolling mountains of New England, separated by stretches of the blue, rolling waters of the Pacific. It's rare for a day to go by without a glimpse of a couple of bald eagles, or harbor seals, or bizarrely bold deer. My bike routes take me past lakes, fields of daisies, cedar forests, harbors and marinas and salty air. It hasn't rained for a month, which is great because I'm bike-dependent but not so good because we're about to run out of water in our well.
I don't mind living side by side with tourists, although I know that some people do, because I find that people on vacation are determined to be happy, and that works for me. They're also shockingly romantic, as I suppose all vacationers must be. Every couple, especially on the ferries (my commute; their pleasure cruise), is doing so much hand-holding and butt-grabbing and out-making that it's nearly reaffirmed my faith in long term relationships and sex drives in seventy-year-olds. All in all, it's a great place to be. People keep telling me what a "great opportunity" this is, which bothers me because they don't know what the hell they're talking about, but aside from that there's only one place where I'd rather be.
Sometimes, I'm standing again underneath the dingy streetlamp of Hawthorne Street and trying to imagine that we weren't saying goodbye. Ninety days. Fine. Ninety nights? An eternity. A kiss, the fear that it's the last one.
I try to pass it off as a pizza craving (west coast pizza is truly awful) - "The hardest thing?" I'll say nonchalantly. "Three months without pizza. I don't know how I'm going to do it."
I'm passing it off successfully. A little too successfully. "Oh wait, you have a boyfriend, don't you" sort of successfully.
Yes. Yes I do.
And with any luck, I'll still have one after the purgatory of separation is over.
Ninety days.
It's easy to see why they come: from a distance, the islands look like the blue, rolling mountains of New England, separated by stretches of the blue, rolling waters of the Pacific. It's rare for a day to go by without a glimpse of a couple of bald eagles, or harbor seals, or bizarrely bold deer. My bike routes take me past lakes, fields of daisies, cedar forests, harbors and marinas and salty air. It hasn't rained for a month, which is great because I'm bike-dependent but not so good because we're about to run out of water in our well.
I don't mind living side by side with tourists, although I know that some people do, because I find that people on vacation are determined to be happy, and that works for me. They're also shockingly romantic, as I suppose all vacationers must be. Every couple, especially on the ferries (my commute; their pleasure cruise), is doing so much hand-holding and butt-grabbing and out-making that it's nearly reaffirmed my faith in long term relationships and sex drives in seventy-year-olds. All in all, it's a great place to be. People keep telling me what a "great opportunity" this is, which bothers me because they don't know what the hell they're talking about, but aside from that there's only one place where I'd rather be.
Sometimes, I'm standing again underneath the dingy streetlamp of Hawthorne Street and trying to imagine that we weren't saying goodbye. Ninety days. Fine. Ninety nights? An eternity. A kiss, the fear that it's the last one.
I try to pass it off as a pizza craving (west coast pizza is truly awful) - "The hardest thing?" I'll say nonchalantly. "Three months without pizza. I don't know how I'm going to do it."
I'm passing it off successfully. A little too successfully. "Oh wait, you have a boyfriend, don't you" sort of successfully.
Yes. Yes I do.
And with any luck, I'll still have one after the purgatory of separation is over.
Ninety days.