Since I was very wee, my family has been visiting a smallish island off the Western coast of Florida called Sanibel. Despite its popularity with the AARP demographic, the rows of similarly-named vacation rentals, and the droves of yuppie Midwestern families that flock there during school breaks, there's always been something intangibly magical about Sanibel that has stayed with me, with us, for the nearly 25 years we've been making the pilgrimage to the island.
As a child, Sanibel was my view of paradise. The buildup to a Sanibel vacation was enough to put excited knots in my stomach during class or on my way to sleep for weeks, even months, before the trip. And at the end, when all the waiting was over, departing from Sanibel always left me with a haunted feeling, an indescribable sadness that I never understood, especially for a place that made me so happy. Maybe it was because of the way it felt like Sanibel was trapped in a time wrinkle; that even while I got older every year, it stayed the same. The same restaurants, and same shops, the same house on the beach with the green roof, the same birds and bugs and geckos - they waited for me every year, regardless of any friends I had made or lost, the inches I had grown, the color of my hair. Leaving somehow felt like being wrenched from this impossible timelessness. It's a feeling beyond nostalgia. It's part of the magic.
I had not been to Sanibel in nearly a decade when this January, after slogging through an emotionally exhausting winter, my mom asked if I might want to go back to Sanibel with my dad to visit my grandparents at their winter condo. It had not only been years since I had been to Sanibel, but years since I had spent time with my dad, just the two of us. It's wonderful how good taking care of your most basic relationships can make you feel about yourself.
Everything was still the same as I remembered. We ate conch fritters and fried oysters and grouper sandwiches at the Lazy Flamingo, our favorite restaurant, where the bartenders ring an old bell when they get a tip and all the drinks come with crushed ice. There is still an aviary at the trailer park on Periwinkle Road, and the same birds live there and make the same noises - Rico's the best talker, but Lola the loudest - and there is still an inexplicable cage full of ring-tailed lemurs that has been there since I was four. We walked along the shore where ladies in hats and one-piece swimsuits still do the Sanibel Stoop and old Hunter S. Thompson lookalikes still fall asleep in beach chairs and obnoxious kids still chase the seabirds until they take raucous flight over the green-gray water. Though I have grown taller, my dad still beat me on the bike path with his long stork legs. And though I have grown older and have my own stories to tell, he still astonished me with me with tales from his life that I had never heard before, that made me laugh and made my eyes wide and made me proud to be his daughter.
It still made me cry to leave Sanibel, but even feeling the sadness was like embracing a friend I had not seen in years, a friend I might not see again for many years - but who would always be my friend. I came home to New York feeling like I had been filled back up with myself. It's easy to lose yourself here. But Sanibel reminded me that there is a me that will never leave, that sticks to the inside of my ribs like conch fritters, that is in my blood and my memories and my dad's stories and my laughter at his stories and always lies just under the rippled surface of change.
See more pictures at my Flickr Page. Photos taken with a Nikon D5100 and 35mm and 55-200mm zoom lens.
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