This house was built in 1949, which makes it almost as ancient as me.  I like that.  I like old houses, old jeans, old guitars, old surfboards.  Only one of the four houses in which we’ve lived was new, and I never felt right there.  Our first house was like this one: small, well-built, lacking all pretense, but full of character.  I believe, like with old musical instruments, old houses are imbued with energy, some of it from people, some of it innate; something time modulates and shapes.  It is comfortable being here. I know this house and this house knows me.

Increasingly, I am intrigued with how it must have been out here on Skinny Island when this place was built.  There can’t have been much here.  The place just to the south, another of the few single-family structures along this stretch of iconic old highway A1A, was built a year earlier, in 1948, but the large majority of the houses lining the numerous streets running perpendicular to the ocean date from the sixties and seventies, and the condo to our north from the early eighties.  I like to think most of this area was like what is preserved in the North Peninsula State Recreation Area, three miles north, just low dune, palmetto, and scrub, home to gopher tortoise, rattlesnakes, dune mice, and Scrub Jays.  For a while anyway, it was old Florida, and these two side by side houses were isolated in that natural setting.  Remarkable.  Traffic on A1A couldn’t have been bad.  We’ve seen it go from light to nearly constant in the fifteen years we’ve been here.  I like to think about how quiet it must have been.

We did a few upgrades to the place on moving in, but fundamentally, it’s solid as a rock, concrete block on a super-thick slab. The ceiling joists and rafters are what they called Dade Pine, essentially heart pine, very dense and virtually impervious to insects and rot.  There are plenty of windows, offering a variety of views of the ocean, all double-hung casements, and while somewhat drafty, there’s that wonderful ripply effect in the old glass, and when everything’s closed down tight, like now, you can’t hear or feel the wind at all.  From December through March it can be very windy, out of the north and northeast, with an occasional real nor’easter raging for days, but the rest of the year we open everything up and the light, easterly sea breezes keep us cool.  The bunker, as we affectionately call it, has endured more than sixty years of harsh weather, salt air, and who knows how many storms.  In the hurricane season of 2004, when three storms passed within a few miles, we lost a few shingles and some soffett, while the condo next door and the house to the south both sustained significant damage.  I stayed here through two of the three storms and, while there were some tense moments, like when the wind threatened to blow down the bolted front door, it was an exhilarating, wonderful experience, and I never felt unsafe.  I think it’s got a good many more years left in it.

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Uniformly gray today; you can’t see the ocean horizon.  The only break in color the white foam of 3-5 foot seas breaking.  Wind predicted to shift from north to southeast, which will warm things up a bit, but it hasn’t happened yet.  I love hearing people say there aren’t any seasonal changes in Florida.  That’s absurd.  The changes are profound, if not extreme.  Anyway, the ocean dictates everything here, and it’s never the same one day to the next.  You are in it here; it seeps in over time.