Serendipity-doo-dah!

How amazing to be in the position of planning and anticipating two disparate, equally wonderful projects.  Canned Ham is inching along when I get a chance to work on it, but mostly, as I glance at the calendar I see that the end of May and my departure for Saba are galloping towards me like a stallion trying to impress the mare on the other side of the pasture (unless the farm is in Iowa, and then it could just as easily—and legally—be another stallion.)  Fortunately, the one major concern I had—who would stay in my house while I’m away—has been taken care of.  My friend Craig, who was the star of a movie for which I wrote the music a thousand years ago when someone who inhabited my body was a composer, is going to move in to spend an Idlewildean summer in the Catskills.  Craig is a writer and director, in addition to holding a SAG card, so he’ll be able to use the cute little shed behind the house that I whimsically dubbed “The Writer’s Studio” for its intended purpose.

 

So many friends have expressed remorse over my leaving my cabin for Idlewild.  “You’re going to miss it so much,” they say.  Well, no.  I’m strangely unsentimental in that respect.  Possessions, y’know?  They’re things.  But yesterday, when I was walking the grounds of Idlewild trying to figure out where to place outdoor furniture and deciding what flowers should go where, I did in fact have a twinge of remorse that I won’t get to spend the summer here.  That Craigster is gonna be one happy fella.

 

But Saba…

 

“Serendipity” is the discovery, or acquisition, of something wonderful while searching for or heading towards something unrelated.  Serendipity has struck once again.  Through reasons which will be elaborated upon in due course (but mostly due to the very generous intervention by one who is for all intents and purposes a [very handsome] stranger) while I am helping out at El Momo I will be residing—not in one of the cottages on the premises as planned—but at another house just down the hill.  To repeat, all will be revealed in time, but a truly remarkable opportunity has presented itself and I have been offered a sweet little apartment of my own on a larger property.  My presence there will (hopefully) be a help to the proprietor of the place but the recipient of the bulk of the good fortune will be… me.

 

Here is the view from what will be my roof terrace.  Please, everyone, take a moment to hate me.