The salt isle soothes my soul.

I wrote that title as a Six-Word Memoir at sixwordmemoirs.com. When writing the back story to accompany it, I decided to put expanded comments about our relationship with Tybee Island, Georgia, here at Red Stick Writer.

 

According to Wikipedia: Native Americans, using dugout canoes to navigate the waterways, hunted and camped in Georgia's coastal islands for thousands of years. The Euchee tribe likely inhabited Tybee Island in the years preceding the arrival of the first Spanish explorers in the area in the 16th century. "Tybee" is the Euchee word for "salt."

 

Wikipedia also says that pirates used the island to hide from those who pursued them. Nowadays ordinary folk go there to hide from hustles and bustles. Life there is laid back. The locals speak of “livin' on Tybee time.” Those are the watchwords for the place and the culture. There is an apparel and accessories store there called Latitude 32, which refers to the coordinates at which Tybee is situated, 32°0′24″N latitude and 80°50′58″W longitude. Just so you’ll know, they have good company, as they share that north-south orientation with San Diego. I equate those watchwords with attitude 32 in the same way that “The Big Easy” and “The City that Care Forgot” speak in a like manner about NOLA, the queen of my Louisiana homeland.

 

Suzie and I made our first journey to Tybee in 2005 and found a place with the serenity and innocence of the late Fifties and early Sixties. That’s when our love affair with Tybee began. We’ve been back every year except two since then. Beginning with our second trip there, we’ve always rented a cottage with a pool through Jim Heflin, who claims to be the janitor at Tybee Cottages. We know better and just call him Saint Peter, since he has the keys to this delightful suburb of heaven.

 

As a first adventure in my retirement which began on August 1, we spent the first two weeks of September there. On all of our other visits we flew and stayed a week. This time we drove and doubled the length of our stay. It was such a pleasure. We rented bikes for the two weeks and got three weeks worth of beach riding in during our stay. Most days we’d end our rides at Fannie’s on the Beach having what we think is the best version of the frozen concoction made so famous by Jimmy Buffet. His fans are called Parrotheads. Well, we never saw Jimmy or any members of his Coral Reefer Band on the Strand there at Fannie’s, but we did fall into the company of Roma Gene Harper (more about her in another post) and her delightful group of locals who call themselves Tybidiots. Their daily gatherings are called Meetings of the Bored, but I can assure you that these fine Tybee citizens are polar opposites to bored or boring. Either that or my judgment was clouded by the 'ritas.

 

We’ve talked in the past about getting a place of our own in Tybee, a home away from home. Last year we checked on a property we liked. It had been on the market for 570 days, and a contract was executed on it the day before our inquiry. On our last day on the island this year, we looked at another house that interested us, and this time things worked out. We closed on October 18 and from that moment forward have declared ourselves to be Tybidiots.

 

It is our plan to spend about four months of each year in Tybee with some time there in each of the four seasons. When we are not in residence, Mr. Heflin (By God, we love him even though he is an Ole Miss Rebel.) will help us rent it to other folks who want to have a taste of Tybee time. Between now and the 2014 rental season, we’ll be sprucing up the place with a fresh paint job and a new roof, and to add just the right finishing touch, we’re adding a pool.

 

It seems that most of the houses on the island have names, so we think it’ll be good idea to hang an appropriate sobriquet on ours. Since we are Dick and Suzie, the name we are currently mulling is The Doozy, which includes the first sound in my name and everything but the first sound in Suzie’s name. Merriam Webster defines a doozy as “an extraordinary one of its kind,” which is exactly what we intend to make our new home away from home.

 

If you have a hankering for a serene and innocent place to shed your stress, watch for a listing of The Doozy at tybeecottages.com around the end of the year or right after New Year’s Day. I speak with experience when I tell you that the boss man there will make sure that your dose of “livin’ on Tybee time” will cause you to have a hankering to come back again and again.