FRACTURE

You never know what - or who- you might run into

Once again, I find myself visiting the one attraction in Key West I never want to see but keep coming back to: Southernmost Foot and Ankle.

The first time was 2007. We were staying in a room on the top floor of the Harbor Inn; as I came down the stairs for breakfast, I slipped and fractured a toe. The next time was 2011. My husband and I were on an Old Island Restoration Homes Tour. I stepped into a pile of dog shit on the way to a mid-century jewel owned by the heirs of A&B Lobster House and tried to scrape the poop off my sandals on a concrete stone before entering the shining terrazzo floors. My foot twisted as I tripped, I broke two toes this time, or as the doctor says, fractured.

In 2015, I wrecked another toe, this time from walking barefoot into the hard rubber heel of my Keen water shoes in the living room of Tobago House, a conch cottage just a block away from Duval Street.

This last one was a doozy. On the first night in a new rental house, a former grain warehouse that still looked like one inside, I got up in the middle of the night and made my way down the stairs for a glass of water. This stairwell was super steep, you could tell it used to connect the lower part of the barn with the upper rafters. Anyway, it was dark and unfamiliar and my sleep-fogged mind confused this stairwell with my stairs at home. Oh, here’s the landing. Not.

And so, here I am once more, taped and booted up to my knee in the biggest and heaviest ortho boot yet, climbing two sets of outdoor stairs to an elevated, old wooden building off N. Roosevelt Boulevard that houses the podiatrist office. an Asian Massage Parlor and storage for a small, decrepit marina.

So very Key West.

When I walk in the office, the only other person in the waiting room is a woman about my age, late fifties or so, with long straggly hair and the leather-tanned skin of a local. She’s wearing an ortho boot almost as big as mine. When I ask what happened, she says her dog got loose at a picnic and she tripped over a tree root running after him. “Busted an ankle and two toes”.

I moan in sympathy. It sounds awful.

“And you?” she asks.

“Fell down the stairs. Fractured my third metatarsal.”

“Ouch.”

I tell her it’s the fourth time I’ve broken something on my foot while in Key West and ask if she’s noticed how many people walk around in town in boots. She has. The doctor says it happens because people aren’t familiar with hotel rooms and new spaces, and they run into things. That and flip flops.

Second along with flip flops for most popular shoe in Key West

Then she asks the question everyone asks during the winter season in Key West, the one I hate that because it assumes I’m a tourist, which I’m not. Not exactly.

“Where are you from?”

“Maryland,” I say. “How about you?”

She’s from Sugarloaf. That means she is a local. And because she is, and because she’s about my age, I begin telling her my Key West story - how I came down in ’72 and keep coming back and how I’ve wanted to live here forever. How I wished I had stayed.

“I stayed,” she said.

Of course she did. That’s what drew me to her. I ask what brought her here, which is what I‘ve wanted to know all along.

Her story begins a lot like mine - college girl coming down from up north in the early 70’s for spring break. But then she meets a guy in a bar and falls hard. He was great, so was the Keys. She couldn’t stand the thought of going back to a Michigan winter. “I went home, got my stuff and moved in.” Then she got pregnant. Got married. Then divorced. She got married again. Had two kids.

She had that worn out look, like a lot of women down here of her age. Living under the intense sun was surely part of it, but it was something else too. There was a cost to living in the Keys. I knew people who had to work two, three jobs to make it work. “Always a hustle,” as Captain Buddy, my friend from Big Pine would say. He was a snorkel boat captain, a radio show host and a musician.

As soon as she finishes her story, I’m telling her how my husband and I are trying to figure out how to live here full time, which is beginning to sound like a broken record to me, and probably to her, too. A lot of people who visit say that. The nurse calls me into the examining room where the doctor takes new X rays and tells me I’ll have to keep the boot on for at lest. 6 weeks.

I’m here for a month.

That means no riding my bike, my favorite thing to do in Key West. No long walks, including walking my dog. The beach is out – it’s impossible to walk in the sand with the boot, and the cast has to stay dry. Navigating those fatal steps in the barn/house is a repeated hassle. To get upstairs, I have to sit on the steps and hoist myself up step by step. Going downstairs requires lowering my ass down carefully one step at a time.

But it’s all okay.

Because I’m here.

I sit on the deck and enjoy the warm January weather, listening to the breezes through the palms. I read. I make lovely dinners. I talk to the wacky old neighbor next door whose house looks like its abandoned, but it’s not. And I begin to put in place the next steps that will make this year, 2019, the year we finally make the move to Key West. A broken foot won’t stop me from that. I spend hours researching homes for sale, drive to open houses to take a look, house hunt with an agent. We tell him we are looking for a “foothold,” a small place where we can at least which begin to live here.

Meanwhile, the foot doctor visits continue, sometimes twice a week, where he X-rays my progress and retapes my cast. The bruises on my foot turn from blue to green to yellow. I never run into the woman with the fractured ankle again, but I think about her a lot. All the time, actually.

What if I had meet someone down here when I came down that first time? What if I rushed back, not just for the boy, but for to live here. What then?

I think of her as my shadow twin, the one who stayed. The one I’ve envied all my life.

But the thing is, I don’t envy her life. I wouldn’t want to be her.

I’m not quite sure what to do with this realization. It fractures the fantasy I’ve lived with most of my life of what it would have been like if I had come back to the Keys right away. I look at who I am now: a woman with three advanced degrees, I’ve been a singer, a writer, an arts producer, a Zen teacher. A person who discovered how to put back the pieces of the shattered girl I was. Would I have any of that if I had returned right away and stayed?

There’s no way to know.