It's Over

Another snowbird season comes to an end.

Late yesterday afternoon as I sat reading in the lounge chair on my porch I was overcome with a feeling I'm not sure I ever felt before: Ecstasy. Contentment and happiness are elusive enough but ecstasy? That's a rare one.

The motor home to my right is gone. I can see the sea. I can feel a breeze. I can hear the surf. The big ugly bus in the space in front of me is gone. I can see the sea out my front porch door. I can see the sea through the front window of the trailer.

I can blast my music if I want because I have no neighbors. If friends come by and want to party, the guy next door (who tried to kill his wife) isn't here to turn on his spotlight in an effort to run them off. (In retrospect, thank goodness that's all he did.)

It was a quiet snowbird season in the park up until the last couple months. There was one emergency hospitalization in a psychiatric hospital in Hermosillo followed a week later by the neighbor trying to kill his wife along with bear spray spraying and machete-ing people. Then a friend suffered a stroke which meant another Hermosillo hospitalization.

It's no wonder then that as the last of the big rigs pulled out and the vista opened up I was overcome with joy, peace and thrilled with the return of solitude. Of course there are people I'll miss but they'll be back in October and others will arrive and we'll see what kind of dramas next year's snowbird season will bring.

Except I won't be here, in this trailer park.

I'll be in a real house just a little bit down the beach from the trailer park. At this point it's a long-term housesitting gig - the owner will be back for a couple weeks around Christmas - then I'll go back to her house until she returns for a couple months in the spring. It looks like it will be a perfect arrangement. I'll be close enough to my trailer that I can walk over here every day and water plants, feed cats, hang out, have a presence at my home so no one's tempted to break in and steal my copper wiring (which is why the house owner wants someone at her house, having returned to a home stripped of copper). And to make sure the trailer doesn't get overrun with mice and palmetto bugs (the cats should help with that).

My hope is that this summer will be more tolerable when it comes to the heat because I'll have room to spread out and won't be confined to this air conditioned box. And because the house is right on the beach, there should at least be a breeze.

This is going to be quite a change - going from this tin can to a real house, and not just for a month but for months. I didn't like home ownership because I felt isolated, preferring apartment buildings and trailer parks. So it'll be interesting to see how I feel about it now. Will I miss the park and the dramas? Or will there be a balance as I roam between the two places?

I'm excited to see how this plays out...nearly ecstatic.