Garnet House Now
This is Garnet House now! I needed a desk, and when necessity calls... I invented this--the ultimate hippie Puerto Rico girl boogie desk! Our stuff hasn't arrived yet, and even once it does, I'm due for a new desk. I will make one--(not telling how just yet, although I know exactly how I want it and it is going to be awesome--as in I could make many and sell them at a nice profit awesome).
I am facing the pool now. There's a guy out there cleaning, spraying the chairs in the gazebo with something that smells bad and wiping them down with a towel. At first I think he's hired, a maintenance guy doing this to supposedly protect us from Covid. But no, it was an action of gallantry. A woman is sitting there now. He changed the music—smartly, from some kind of AC/DC thing to the Open Arms song by Journey my first love played for me. Good choice. Then he left her there.
The only drawback is that it’s a little precarious. If I’m not careful and forget to watch my knees, it could be disastrous, with upending the wine and the bamboo candle torches falling over and my computer crashing to the hard tile, not to mention everything else on here.
But it could be worse. There’s a gorgeous tall fat palm tree out my windows above this makeshift desk of two bar table stools and a cheap boogie board. It’s one Lenore bought us in January when we were in the AirBnB, not knowing how it would go, being on vacation and not wanting to invest in boards to take back to the prairies. Walmart boards we could abandon. Then Andy offered to take my stuff, let me keep it at his place these months. So these two cheap boards got saved.
One day I used one as a lap desk like the kind we used to buy from Chapters in our previous life. You know—the beanbag type ones on the back and a desktop surface on the top with a drink holder. I was sitting on the balcony and wanted to write something so put the board across my knees.
My most important invention though today was my wonderful piece of driftwood I found on this morning’s walk. It’s a reversible fat Sharpie holder. Chad would have been so proud of me. Would have highly approved. You can even stick in the lid so that it holds the lid while you pull out the marker and then have a holder for your lid while you use your marker and you don’t have to worry about forgetting where you put the lid! Pretty ingenious if I do say so myself.
The coral for the pen I already had—the perfect size for my favorite regular Bic pens. On the other side of my desk is a coconut husk with the other Sharpie and a pencil—and my headphones wrap stick, which is driftwood also. I was winding my headphones around my finger trying to think where to put them, what their place was…and abracadabra—there it was! The driftwood I found earlier had a purpose!
Did you notice my cell phone holder??? That is the kind of thing that makes me happy! What a gorgeous piece of driftwood with dark veins in the pale weathered wood, perfect for holding my phone, and when I take my phone, the charger cord stays hung nicely. Practical decorations like this from Nature absorb electrical energy so that we don’t have to absorb the buzz and can have more calm.
All I needed now was a chair—so I took the old rusty purplish deck chair from the living room and voila! Here I am—realizing many people are either too scared or not as dumb as I am to make the move to paradise. People think about it all the time. Ponder the idea on bad days. Think about trading it all in for a chance to live by a beach, to live our best days in bliss, our last days baking in the sun and never have to come back. But most people never actually do it. I mean—who does that?
Who just takes off and lives in paradise? And how the hell does anybody make it happen? Well, if I can do it, so can about anybody. Keep reading and I’ll eventually tell you how I did it. I don’t know if that will have anything to do with how you will do it, but there is much to be learned from my experience. I can point you in the right direction and help to avoid pitfalls—that is, if you actually want to live in paradise and not just think about it.
For now—I’ve got a desk! And yes, the windows are all open in my new indoor-outdoor lifestyle—and I can hear the crickets. The air is warm and humid. Beachy. It’s dark out but I’m still in my bikini and it’s still wet. I have my wine in a mason jar because, as I’ve mentioned, our stuff still hasn’t arrived. But se la vie—I’m drinking wine from what I think was a pickle jar… I’m knock knock knocking on heaven’s door…here in Isabela, Puerto Rico.
This is Garnet House now, baby. Miss you every day, every night.