“This is our anniversary trip. We come here every year like turtles that come to roost or whatever turtles do. This is our fifth year.  I typed in the most romantic places on the Gulf Coast and Fairhope was one of them. Things began for us on 4/20. It was our first date and we have almost been married from that date. We knew each other before, but that was the day we surrendered. It was Good Friday. We called it God Friday. We live in New Orleans and I am a teacher. I have been a bouncer, a Jazzercise instructor, a lumberjack, and a door-to-door knife salesman. My favorite job was skid mark inspector at Goodwill. When you drop off underwear at Goodwill, there is someone who is paid to inspect them. If a pair is not passable, it goes into a bag and is shipped to China. There were people in China who had the job of taking that filthy underwear out of the bag. Every job and situation is a learning experience. I did not want to stay as a skid mark inspector, but I am wiser about the world because of it.”

“I was a graphic designer for 13 years and got bored so I am back in school. Why do you have to do the same thing all of your life?  I am not sure what I want to do next. We have two kids and will stay in New Orleans for eight years before the last one is gone. We will keep a foot in New Orleans and have other little places around the world that are secondary homes. This is both of our second marriages. We learned from bad first marriages about what we want and don’t want. I had to get out of that marriage to find happiness again. We learned from our mistakes. We knew the good, the bad, and the ugly about each other before we got married.”

“There is nothing hidden in my closet with her, which is a scary thing. But she never went away.  In December I had diverticulitis and couldn’t keep food down. I lost a lot of weight and looked like a skeleton. I am 37 and realized how much I want to live. It changed my practices of eating and started thinking of my body as something I needed to take care of. I have learned to treat the bad experiences as parts of myself and shake hands with my shadows. I have to own the bad parts of me, too. Everything I have done, I chose it. It feels good to get to the other side where you can laugh or at least smile about it.”

Our plan is to stay on the beach all day and greet the thunderstorms as they roll in. We will fight off the storms with our peacock umbrella and then run from the rain.”