Mermaids Who Create Retreat Night 2, Day 2

The Shrimp Cottage Circa 1962 is a bouquet of pastels, greens, blues, pinks, oranges, all tastefully matched to one another to create the kind of happiness I haven’t felt since playground time in elementary school.  I read in the guestbook that a mother with daughters and a grandmother stayed at this cottage in August and I keep having flashes of the girls in  socks jumping on the beds while grandmother sets Coca Cola bottles in the refrigerator.

This has given me an idea for the short story I”m composing, in which Duke, the character in my story, while trying to woo his wife and old time companion from the trenches of her workload has an image of children running around the house, jumping on beds and playing in the backyard that feels to him almost like a ghost apparition.

This is a picture of my self-designated writing space.

Yesterday, hubby and i enjoyed breakfast at Cafe Gelatohhh in Savannah.  In the meantime, a rubber storage facility behind the port burned a thick black column of billow smoke.

So we quickly ran back to Tybee where we did some kitch shopping at Chu’s Department Store, a huge warehouse space of island shell art, wind up toys, (we bought a walking red crab and a swimming shark for our growing collection on windups) and inflatable turtles.  

Then it was still too cold for us Southern residents (under 50 degrees) so we went back to the cottage and watched team figure skating at the olympics.

For some reason watching figure skating gets me all weepy and soft inside, but all the same I was able to keep up with my chronicle commentary, and my mostly accurate prediction of the winners (nothing difficult there as the top three are always Russia, Canada and USA, most often exactly in that order). I managed to fool Joel that I actually know something about figure skating.  I wrote the first third of my story, sprawled comfortably on this denim couch and with the tv at low volume near by. Interesting how well that worked.  We had a dinner of spinach ravioli in Vodka sauce and it all felt very good and simple. We’re getting very used to living in this cottage, Mona: it may be hard to shoo us out on Monday morning.

The column stack of black, toxic rubber smoke fortunately did not follow us to Tybee but headed to Savannah — another blessing of being here at Mermaid Cottages rather than at home, right upwind of the burning inferno.

This morning promises sunshine and temperatures high enough to break in our new bike cruisers. Hope it gets warm enough for a ride on the beach.  Winter, enough all ready.  This is the South1