It’s our final day in Jamaica. We need to take it out with a bang. Stretch, our entertainment coordinator friend, scolded us for not showing up at the show we promised to participate in last night. We told him we were leading “Buffalo Soldier” and “Three Little Birds” singalongs with our chef at the Japanese restaurant, but he wasn’t having any of it.
“We looked all over for you,” he said. “Have you seen Chocolate yet today?”
“Yes,” Amy said. “She forgave us.”
“Hmph,” Stretch said. “I won’t let you off that easy.”
And with that, we promised to come to Karaoke tonight. After that, we are eager for the Roots show: the story of Jamaica’s history through music and dance.
I cannot wait. We will not go to bed early tonight: we will go out with a bang.
For now, we are on the beach, drinking our afternoon coffee (with rum, blended with ice) out of coconuts and talking about finding gaps and filling them at work, making decisions probabilistically, and the fundamental theorem of calculus.
I’m headed out tomorrow, not for work, not for visiting folks, but for vacation. By 2pm I’ll be sitting at the beach drinking rum drinks out of coconuts with my dearest girlfriends, women I’ve known and loved since I was 12 years old.
I haven’t packed, but I do have four books (including a book on sailing), $1 bills for tipping, and my passport. The only other things I need are swimsuits and my straw hat, right?
I’ll try to keep up my mobile blogging while I’m there, but it will all depend on wifi.
Well, maybe not just on the wifi. I’ll play it by ear.
One of my favorite summer cocktails is a rum daiquiri (recipe below). With only three ingredients, it is clean, cold, fresh, and simple. Buy a bottle of rum, a few limes, and some sugar to make simple syrup, and you can make one anywhere you have access to ice.
Or so I thought.
Our first night on vacation I went to make myself one – I had prepped simple syrup earlier in the day and was all ready to go – and I realized I didn’t have a shaker. Cocktails with citrus should be shaken in order to get a fresh bubbly flavor, but you know, vacation rentals don’t always have all the tools you’re used to having at home. I banged around in the cabinets to be sure I couldn’t rig something, then shrugged my shoulders and resigned myself to stirring.
The drink served as a rum, lime, and sugar delivery mechanism, which isn’t all bad, but it tasted flat and I didn’t make another.
The following night my husband and I both wanted daiquiris, but we wanted them to have the zing we craved – the zing you can only get from shaking, not stirring. So I banged around in the cabinets some more, double checked where the wine glasses were stored, triple checked the cupboard with the blender. No cocktail shaker. I wandered back into our bedroom to brainstorm with my husband, and then I saw our solution.
A few months ago I received some WordPress swag after guest hosting a writing challenge on The Daily Post. The box included a tee-shirt, a copy of The Year Without Pants, some stickers, and an insulated Klean Kanteen bottle with a sealable sippy lid (aka “Cafe Cap”). I love this bottle. It keeps my water icy in the summer and my coffee steaming in the winter.
And with a screw top cap that can be mostly closed off, on vacation it serves as our cocktail shaker. I forgot to close off the sippy hole the first shake and I flung sugar-lime-rum everywhere, and when you do close the sippy hole it doesn’t seal perfectly for vigorous shaking, but the minimal drink loss was worth it: the daiquiris were fresh and not flat, shaken and not stirred. Sometimes you have to improvise.
Rum Daiquiri recipe (makes 1 drink)
1.5 – 2 oz rum
juice of 1/2 large lime
3/4 oz simple syrup*
ice
Mix all ingredients in a cocktail shaker (or Klean Kanteen bottle with lid closed) and shake vigorously for ~ 10 seconds. Strain over ice in a rocks glass. Garnish with lime wedge.
*To make simple syrup, heat equal parts water and sugar over medium heat until sugar is dissolved (we use a lot of simple syrup in our house so I usually mix 1 cup sugar and 1 cup water per batch). You do not need to stir constantly, nor do you need to bring it to a boil. Once the sugar is dissolved, remove from heat and allow to cool. If you are in a hurry to use it in drinks, cool it in an ice bath to avoid melting the ice in your drink and watering it down.
Morning clouds over Gulf of Mexico, Anna Maria Island, FL
I’m on the porch at a condo at the beach listening to seagulls and a construction crew’s country music station. We are on vacation. While we’re here, I’ll attempt to keep from vacating my blog altogether. I don’t know that I’ll have anything sensical to say, but maybe I can post some pretty pictures.
Today I braided our daughter’s hair. She is growing her bangs out, and they are at that stage where they are too long to leave hanging but still to short to tuck behind her ear. I attempted a French braid on one side to tidy the scraggly strands, and with her hair pulled back, her face is bright. I cannot stop gazing at her tawny tanned skin, and gold-flecked hazel eyes, and honey blonde hair against her crisp white shirt as she sits on her grandmother’s lap. She is golden and summery, innocent and beautiful, and I wish I could stop time, to stay in this moment of her childhood forever.
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The sky is blue again now that the storm blew through. Palm fronds sway gently and white puffs drift across the sky. Morning is my favorite time of day on vacation. I sip coffee on the balcony while my family sleeps in. I watch the sky and listen to wind in the palms. Mourning doves coo, and in the distance, waves pound the beach. Across the street, a screen door slaps shut behind a woman with a corn broom. In a white crushed-shell yard shaded by palms and broad banana leaves, she sweeps her walk. Her husband pushes open the screen door, and it slaps shut behind him, too. He stands on the welcome mat and sips coffee from a curved white mug to be in her company. They do not speak, and their faces are smooth and relaxed as they absorb the quiet morning. Broom corn bristles swiff across red brick, and I love the scouring sound. It is rustic, and welcoming, and I am glad she chose the gentle broom instead of a roaring leaf blower.
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It is our final day of vacation. I drink coffee on the beach, my feet buried in sand, in a low rainbow-striped folding chair, the kind with aluminum tubing and a seat that brushes the sand when you sit in it. Sitting in the cool shade of an Australian pine, early enough that morning sun behind me casts the tree’s shadow across the beach and into waves, I look across blue-green chop to the horizon. The wind coming off the Gulf of Mexico blows the brim of my straw hat up in front, and white puffs of clouds float over the sea. I think of Ernest Hemingway, and how well he wrote these waters in his Key West and Cuba days. I envy his fiction, that he had stories to accompany this backdrop, drama to set upon this stage. An excuse to capture this landscape in an art that transcends time. I wish, as I sit and absorb the scene, that I had such stories in me.
One of the things I love most about Florida, that I miss when I’m away, and that I fall in love with all over again when I return, is the sky. More specifically, I love the clouds. Cloudscapes in Florida are dynamic and dependable. Nearly every afternoon in summer, formations build before your eyes in a blue sky, their faces to the brilliant Florida sun. The piles are clean and bright, like bleached cotton, and you can actually watch them grow, billowy cumulus clouds piling up like a massive mound of shaving cream in a crystalline sky. Variations of light on the clouds are dramatic, ranging from a blinding white on the uppermost billows to an ominous blue black on their low underbellies.
Every day, the clouds are different. Sometimes they are far away, and they move across the sky like giant jellyfish, trailing rain like dark gray tentacles. Other times you watch them grow, you feel the wind pick up as they become cumulonimbus storm clouds, sucking air into their growing system, and you wonder, is that coming our way?
And then that blue-black underbelly is right there,and it blots out the sun. The temperature drops. The menacing cloud is low, right above you. You can see details of its texture, and there is a sense of immediacy – the cloud isn’t over there, where I can watch it from afar. It is right here, like that tree and this lizard, and like me.
A bolt of lightning blinds you, and a clap of thunder cracks, and you feel the ground and your chest vibrate with the impact. Maybe you’ll get scared if you’re outside, and you’ll run for cover. If you’re inside you watch rain pelt hot asphalt and green palm fronds. The storm will crash violently, with thunder and lightning and rain so heavy you have to pull off the highway if you’re driving in it.
Ten minutes later, maybe twenty, it will all be over. The road will steam. The palm fronds will glisten. The sky will clear for sunset, leaving a few cloud remnants, maybe some high cirrus feathers, to reflect pinks and oranges of the sun’s fiery farewell as it drops below the horizon.
And then, you forget about clouds for a while. At least until the next day, when you see a couple of white puffs here and there in the morning. And at 2 o’clock you look inland, and you see a curve of white above palm trees, a great dollop of cloud that grows before your eyes, and you pause in what you’re doing to watch the show.
Butterfly Mind 