Seminole, Florida: Blue's House

There wasn't much to Seminole.

Blue lived there. Her brother lived there. 

I lived there, in her brother's room, after he moved out.

(Which got interesting when he came down to visit and had to sleep on the living room sofa.)

But Seminole as a whole was a retirement crap-shoot.

The only folks there were the newlyweds and the nearly-deads.

Either way, Blue's childhood house was my favorite place.

It was right behind the high school football field where we could troll games during dinner.

The garden out front thrived with frogs that her mother helped raise from tadpoles. 

Their spray-painted tree crowded with seats her brother arranged for hookahs.

The backyard swarmed with loyal squirrels who received peanuts just for existing. 

I made a habit of visiting.

I even drove by sometimes to drop letters in her mailbox.

(We exchanged enveloped notes.)

-The first night I stayed over, it was in her older brother's bedroom.

I snuck from my window's ledge, into my car, and through his.

It was late. When my eyelids blinked open, I must've drifted to dreams 

because it was daylight and I was late for lecture (and in loads of trouble, I imagined).

I snuck by pretty often regardless.

My parents caught me maybe twice.

My brother caught me more often than not, 

but he was always off sneaking somewhere else-

hence, we had an understanding.

After the courtship ended, I had no need to sneak through those windows.

Yet Kelsey Blue insisted I keep coming over.

Neither of us had any idea that eventually his room would be my room.

Time passed.

In Seminole, we'd wade the Indian Rocks shoreline, Kelsey with her metal detector, me with my quarters, trying to give her something to find. 

I'd take her to dinner, sneak wasabi in her green tea ice-cream.

She'd write secrets on sugar packets, put them back when our waitress left.

We'd, over time, told Splenda a terrific chunk of classified information.

We'd also, by default, told each other every secret we could remember. 

and when we ran out of mysteries, we'd re-cap.

*

When I would stay over to hang out with Blue,

we would compete to wake up first:

I'd set my alarm 15 minutes before I knew hers would chime

and I'd make her breakfast with tons of ketchup and far too crispy of hash browns.

She'd sometimes beat me to the punch.

Then, a thousand breakfast-in-beds later, 

I woke her up with the jingle of my car keys.

"We're going on a day trip," I announced.

She rubbed her eyes, still only half absorbing English.

I told her to get dressed and grab her iPod, I was dragging her to the sponge docks.

We decided during the hour-long drive that we would make plans for bigger trips. 

After our Turkish coffees in Tarpon Springs and our mini heart-attacks from finishing the mud at the bottom of the cups, we picked cities in a frenzy. 

Then, we set aside a huge ceramic piggy to deposit trip-funds into.

The time would arise. 

We just had to wait.

And maybe play patty-cake in the meantime.

That was Seminole that we shared.