Pine Straw and Other Debris

  Over the last 100 years or so the Chesapeake Bay water quality has degraded to the point where the Bay is dying.  Its natural resource (crab, oyster, fish, etc) populations had all been reduced to the point of being unsustainable.  What had once been taken for granted is now disappearing at an alarming rate.  When I was a Maryland teenager in the 1970’s you could go into Towson for dinner at a local crab shack.  I can’t remember its name anymore but I do remember sitting down to a newspaper (what’s that?) covered picnic table with a bushel of crabs and a pitcher of beer for hours and it cost about $25 for enough people to fill up a picnic table.  That’s not $25 each.  That’s $25 for the bushel and first pitcher.  The machine shop where I worked had about 50 employees and would sponsor a crab feast every summer for everyone and their families.  All the crabs you could eat, all the beer you could drink.  Those days are now long gone. ...

Cheri and I originally wanted to slowly sail around the world when we retired in 2015.  We spent six years getting our boat and ourselves ready and then life got in the way.  My Mom needed to move in with us and she couldn’t get on board the boat.  It wasn’t even low tide yet so we knew right away that we needed to make other arrangements.  We were told that Florida didn’t have state income tax but they did have mostly nice weather and alligators.  We bought a house sight-unseen near Jacksonville, mostly because that area isn’t attractive to hurricanes.  We moved our boat down there thinking we could still sail to the Bahamas now and then.  Got Mom moved into the house and then we got old.  Arthritis for me and a heart attack for Cheri convinced us to stay stuck in the dirt and sell the boat.  That door to our dream had slammed shut.  We had huge regrets about that but we’re pretty good at rolling with the punches so we just kinda moved ...