After much deliberation, we moved into the one bedroom apartment
above the bakery. My mom was partial to having an oven and liked how clean it
was kept. I tried to convince myself, like a child trying to convince her mother
for dessert before dinner that the place felt slightly bigger if one counted
the veranda as another room.
In her fuchsia-flowered sundress, Miss Janis, the owner, welcomed
us with a warm Betty Crocker smile and handed Jordan and Maddi each a homemade brownie
ice-cream sandwich. As I signed her guest book she told me, “The only drawback
about staying here is you’ll get fat.” Not the bonus I was hoping for.
Lugging luggage in tropical heat is exercise enough to cancel out
any tantalizing ice-cream treat. After I had my kids settled down for the night,
I headed straight to the shower like a marathon runner reaching for a Dixie cup
of water. Three minutes after stepping in (or maybe it was four), the
electricity went out. Showering in the dark I grappled with the irony of being
kicked out of one place due to power that never shorted and checking into another
where the power goes out twenty minutes after we arrive.
I accidentally killed a baby gecko because I thought it was a baby
scorpion. It crawled under the
television and I yelled for a shoe. Maddi snatched my flip flop and hurried to
watch like she had front-row seats at a rodeo.
entertaining. Miss Janis quickly
gave us the highlights of things to try and places to visit while we are here. My
impression is that she knows most of what’s going on in this small town. Her
corner store is like the beauty parlor filled with many secrets that everyone
knows pieces about.
Our first night in our new spot my mom and I pulled out Travel
Scrabble in the extended living room (on the patio).
I drew the letter “B” so I got to start first. My mom muttered something about it not being fair and I threw her a
glance that said the game hadn’t even started.
“There’s a hole in the hamper,” my mom told me working to change
the subject.
“The hamper?”
“Yes! A hole in the hamper. I hope we didn’t do that,” Her voice chided.
“You mean the hammock?”
I asked.
“Oh, my…the hammock. Yes. My brain is half-baked.” My mom said and
then added that the heat directly correlates to her Scrabble score.
We played eleven games of Scrabble in less than seven days and
taste-tested coconut chocolate chip cookies and cinnamon pineapple coffee cake.
Maybe we’re delirious from the heat, trying to make mazes out of words or the added
sugar intake required when one lives above a bakery. Who can really say? All I
know is that if the electricity stays on we are set.
