Full Circle

"The days go by and you wish you were a different guy Different friends and a new set of clothes You make alterations and affect a new pose A new house a new car a new job a new nose But it's superficial and it's only skin deep Cause the voices in your head keep shouting in your sleep Get back!

Get back!

Back where you started, here we go round again Back where you started, come on do it again"

-Ray Davies, the Kinks

It's been a few days, eh?

Things have been busy, to say the least. I was buried in trial preparation, but we shoehorned a flight over to Perry Saturday so P could see the farm for the first time since Idalia. Besides being emotional and gut-wrenching for her, we found some hidden damage that has started to reveal itself in the main house. I'll be calling USAA today, and starting the long, miserable process of submitting a hurricane claim. Again.

After working into the evening on Sunday when we got back to PC, I rolled straight into a two day trial while P picked up where she left off at the Panama City Surgery Center. Now it's midweek already, we have friends coming over for supper tonight, and will likely be back at the farm in a couple days.

This morning at 407, rolling over and seeing P's outline, a curve in the darkness illuminated by the predawn glow, it occurred to me we'd been here before, five years almost to the day since the storm turned our world upside down.

She's back standing in the same operating room where she worked for years. I'm back prancing around in a courtroom at the Bay County Courthouse, yesterday in the Family Law Courtroom. The last time I was there I was getting a divorce. Tonight we'll have a little happy hour out on the veranda, just like the old days, and see friends who were a big part of our life then, and still are.

All the same, like we blinked our eyes and the intervening five years hadn't happened. But it did, and looking a little more carefully we live in a totally different space now. We're married, for starters. Back then we were planning to buy a house we'd found on Bunker's Cove, with canopy oaks and a big pool out back. That all changed on 10 October. From there we were blown west to Walton County, then to the farm through the scary early days of the pandemic, then to Corning for remote work and Peg's stint at Guthrie, then back here to open the PC office for the firm, and now bouncing back-and-forth between New York, Wyldswood, and Panama City. The town may not have changed much, except maybe a little less shady without the trees and a little more spruced up with all that insurance money, but we're much different people. How could we not be?

And the folks around us have changed since the storm. Or maybe it was the Trump denouement and insurrection. There's an unhappy, mean edge to those who've endured this ride. You see it in court. You see it in the operating room. You see it in the stickers in truck windows urinating on our president, suggesting a certain sexual act directed at him, or maybe just displaying an oversized middle finger to everyone following behind. You find a little of that all over the country, a sign of anger and frustration at the world we now occupy and the quality of life that's spiraled downward for a lot of people. But here the meanness is more intense. The storm probably has something to do with all that.

In spite of the unhappy vibe around here, it's still beautiful. I took advantage of the 72 degree morning by walking to work, which by the looks I received from passing cars qualifies as a genuinely eccentric act in the South. Looking out across the bay from the Tarpon Dock Bridge, I felt awfully lucky to get to share this place with P, and to wake up together beside waters that have been the backdrop for most of my adult life.