Husband and Wife

 5/20/25-5/23/25

It’s been a week since we arrived in Flamingo. They weren’t lying when they said it was hot and buggy here. After cleaning and settling into our room on Monday we had a nice dinner on our front stoop. Our door opens to Florida Bay and we can see small keys from our room. We share a kitchen with five or six other employees. It’s as you would expect a community kitchen to look with two fridges a sink and a stove that has two settings; the fiery depths of hell and off. 

Opal-

I am being trained at my job in the restaurant to do everything. I serve, I buss, I prep food, I manage money, I do inventory. Practically everything but cook. The restaurant itself could seat about 60 people at max capacity so it’s a fair size. However the most people I’ve seen in it so far are 10 of the company’s employees coming in on their lunch break. I knew summer in the Everglades was slow but I didn’t think it would be this slow. There’s about 40 employees here total which may outnumber the amount of guests. But that makes for an everyone knows everyone situation. We are definitely the youngest ones here and everyone keeps asking “why did you pick the summer to come work here?”

Friday evening we were both off work by 5pm. We decided to take the paddle board out on the bay. Now to get out on the water you first have to paddle your heart out past the mosquitoes. This is hard when you have to balance two people on a paddle board. We did manage though and made it out to the breeze. We were out for about an hour at sunset taking in the view and paddling through seagrass. At points when we stopped moving you could hear and see constant jumping and movement of fish in the water. We saw a few small sharks swim by and even followed two for a while. It felt like the bay was alive, teaming with life. Then Oliver noticed a weird looking fish swimming nearby. We got closer and that weird looking fish turned out to be a stingray. It glided through the water along with us then settled in the silt. The sun was setting a glorious pink and orange classic Florida sunset as we turned back towards our beach. We paddled over the ray again without noticing and were quite shocked when it splashed up and swam off. I think I let out sharp yelp. By the time we got closer to shore the tide had gone out quite a bit. This meant for Oliver pushing the paddle board with his feet in the muck while I sat at the front and dug my hands into the ground. I’m sure we looked quite foolish heading back towards employee housing to anyone who saw. 

- Oliver 

So far I am enjoying my job. My coworkers and manager are all good people and the work is difficult but rewarding. What I don’t enjoy is the mosquitoes. Even with long sleeves, long pants and a bug jacket you’re not safe. It’s bad enough to work in but what really gets me is coming home and having mosquitoes in our room or having to walk to the car and be constantly swatting at them. Still, I am learning a lot and am doing work I feel like I can take pride in. 

Opal wasn’t lying when she said we are the youngest ones here. In fact, the average age is high enough that people seem to have forgot about dating and all assume Opal and I are married. After are first day of work we both told each other that enough people had assumed it that we were just going to roll with that story. It didn’t come up much until one of my coworkers asked me about our wedding and now we have been married two years, our anniversary is August 15th, and I don’t remember when I said my vows. If he knew how hot August 15th is in Missouri was he might have caught on, but he didn’t and now we’re in too deep to go back. 

The few (Hundred) mosquito bites sustained while weed whacking Friday.