1. I flew to Orlando, where I met two of my older brothers at the airport. Having adult children, they both expressed relief as we drove east, out of range of the Florida theme parks. (I did not need to have children to feel a related form of relief.)
2. As kids, we had spent a lot of time in Florida, visiting our grandparents. We remembered deep-sea fishing, waterskiing on the canals, snorkeling for sea urchins and sand dollars, playing ‘sharks and minnows’ in the motel pool, and walking up and down the pier in Fort Lauderdale.
3. Being much younger than my siblings, I was sometimes ‘too little’ to participate in every activity; I remembered spending time in the weeds, trying to catch lizards that we called ‘chameleons,’ but that I recently learned are in fact called something else.
4. On this trip, we were visiting our parents. It was strange but undeniable: thanks to the passage of time, we were older than our parents had been, just as they were now older than their parents had been. The one constant, it seemed, was shuffleboard, which we had played as kids and were again playing, decades later. (Somehow, I was still constantly ending up ‘in the kitchen’.)
5. The alligator watched from the pond.
6. The vast Florida sky darkened with an approaching storm.
7. After the rains, we walked to the bridge, where the sun illuminated the water, which seemed to stretch infinitely into the future and the past.
