Author: Vic Socotra

Life & Island Times: Go Fishing

Author’s Note: “What goes down must come up” as they say in American stock markets and exchanges . . . or . . . as the card game unsnarkily says “Go Fish!” Permit your author this brief island return to talk about a shipwreck as a metaphor for what may be on our surface-search radar […]

Tuesday’s Top Ten

The storm that has captivated our attention- and killed around fifty citizens- is stalled overhead. Two high pressure systems, one northeast and one to the west, have captured what is left of the fury that traveled west across the Atlantic Ocean from Africa, arced north across Cuba before slamming Florida, raking the interior and intensifying […]

Expendable Part 2

Editor’s Note: Marlow’s storm memories continue this morning, looking back to an account of a couple 1944 Hurricanes that didn’t cause as much damage as our latest hit from “Ian.” Of course, there were a couple million fewer retirees from Up North living there then, our storm tracking is better now, and fewer people got […]

Life & Island Times: Expendable

Editor’s Note: Marlow’s storm memories continue this morning, looking back to an account of a couple 1944 Hurricanes that didn’t cause as much damage as our latest hit from “Ian.” Of course, there were a couple million fewer retirees from Up North living there then, our storm tracking is better now, and fewer people got […]

Postlude

The word sounds a little like some drug you might take to get over something. “Post” meaning “after,” and “Lude” one of those things coming over the former border in backpacks. The dictionary says it actually refers to a musical interlude, normally on the organ, played at the end of a church service as a […]

Expendable Part 1

Editor’s Note: Marlow’s Coastal Empire is near the second landfall of Hurricane Ian, an impressive recent storm. We talked as it approached to ascertain safety issues and ensure best wishes for minor damage. Ian’s remnants are still pouring down from thick gray clouds at Refuge Farm, but no wind and no storm surge. They say […]

(Stormy) Weather Report

There was some relief from the regular readers that wrote to say “thanks!” for no Weather Report this week. We have all been watching (or feeling) enough weather already. They hoped they wouldn’t have to review the litany of social circus acts in progress. We would have deferred, but an older person whose pronouns agree […]

Ian’s Wrath, and Aftermath

There was resignation but no panic here at Refuge Farm. The news of Hurricane-Tropical Storm-Hurricane Ian’s advance had been pervasive over the last week as The Big Story. Images of shattered homes and expensive boats stacked willy-nilly on the Florida shores was a sobering indication of what had swept across the Sunshine State and was […]

Arrias and His Muse: Sitting With a Shipmate

Editor’s Note: Arrias was at The Farm to assist in Downsizing the Decades. His Muse is clear on this one. – Vic Author’s Note: My muse hit me on the head on the way home last Sunday, and I stopped and wrote down one line and then continued on home and lost the string… it […]

Bragging Rights

(Typhoon Kip, the most powerful storm ever to come ashore in 1979. It has been part of the Bragging Rights argument for years, since some of us were there, a fact of which they remind us any time anything else comes by. Like this morning). You know the feeling. “Something wicked this way comes.” This […]