Danger in Paradise?
Sanibel Island
Palm wound
There's nothing like a road trip to set the tone for a week in Paradise, in our case, Sanibel Island, Florida. It's a time to visit distant friends and family, deliver packages too fragile to mail and explore something new. With Jimmy Buffet songs humming in my head, we packed up the car and headed south for Florida at the crack of dawn.
Three days later, after a night near Hilton Head visiting with a friend, a stop at the Mighty Eighth Air Force Museum for research for my novel, and a short visit to deliver a painting to my daughter and husband in Orlando, we pulled into the driveway of a magnificent home, rented for a month by my BFF grammar school chum. We parked in the driveway behind her car, unloaded and headed for the beach, a short walk up the road.
Once inside, my husband took one look at the the six-burner Wolf stove and began cooking. He's in seventh heaven and so is my BFF because she doesn't cook, she heats. On the second floor, we're ensconced in the master bedroom (think Tommy Bahama on steroids). The master bath is half the size of our apartment, complete with dual sink stations and a rain forest shower. On the lower level next to the 4th bedroom and 5th bathroom, there's a theater room. It's small with overstuffed recliners. Pretty fabulous, eh? But wait, there's also a heated pool totally enclosed in screens and sprinkled with lounge chairs around its perimeter and floats for bobbing about. It's perfect, right?
It was afternoon on the second day. Husband and BFF were reading and I was writing; all of us taking it easy after an early morning low tide beach walk and shelling excursion, which we topped off with a decadent breakfast on the porch of our favorite beach shack restaurant. A booming thump and whack thrust us out of our revelry. We ran to the window. The sky was blue and the sun sparkled through the many palm trees in the landscaped front yard. Their massive leaves swayed in the wind creating dancing shadows all over the yard. What could that noise have been? Were we in danger? Was someone trying to break in?
We scurried outside to find a gigantic palm frond laying innocently next to our car. Detectives that we are, we investigated. The frond, we surmised, had been pulled from its tree by the wind. What we'd heard was the frond smashing something on its death dive to the ground. The evidence was clear - the victim was our car. A nine inch gash through the paint to the steel on the left rear quarter panel glared at us. We sighed. We returned to the house. Such is life is paradise. You take it as it comes and don't worry about the small stuff.