What "Under the Gumbo Limbo" means

The Gumbo Limbo tree pictured in my blog design is actually a tree my mother grew from a cutting she brought back from the Bahamas. The tree is tall and magnificent. I have two trees that were cuttings grown from her Gumbo Limbo.

My mother's tree sits beside a stand of bamboo in the back yard of our family home. Before the bamboo, my childhood playhouse stood for many years. My father built it for me. It had louvre windows, vinyl flooring, a peaked roof and was painted yellow. The very back of the small rectangular one room structure had real glass windows that slid up to open.
The playhouse was a place my brother and I claimed as our own. We slept overnight in it and stored our bikes there. Behind the playhouse there was a huge Australian pine tree we would climb.

We loved that tree because it allowed us to see all our neighbors, including Mr. and Mrs. Hoyt who lived next door to us in a two story stucco house. Mr. Hoyt was very tall and strong. Mrs. Hoyt was very round and short. We could almost, but not quite, see into their bedroom window on the second floor. We would call out to them and Mr. Hoyt would come to the window and say good morning or good afternoon to us very politely. Neither of them ever yelled at us for disturbing their privacy or annoying them, although I'm sure we did. Our other neighbors could see us up in the tree but no one ever acknowledged our presence like the Hoyts. They were our favorites.

During a hurricane named Donna or Betsy, our playhouse was destroyed. The roof blew off, landing in the alley beside the Australian pine. I remember that hurricane very vividly, because the pouring rain and howling wind was very frightening, and because it blew down our playhouse and tree.

I wasn't living at home when the Gumbo Limbo tree was planted. I was in college then. When my mother died in 2009, the tree was 37 years old. It's peeling red skin, that gives it the nickname 'tourist' tree, is a deep russet and orange red and its leaves are dark green. The leaves are stiff and rustle against each other making a brushing noise with the slightest breeze.

Before I left my mother's house the final time, clean and sparkling inside, with its yard mowed and shrubbery trimmed, I took several photos of that tree. I wanted to remember it and how long it had stood there guarding my mother's house. It had traveled to the house as a twig, carried aboard the Irma Marie, a yacht named for my grandmother. It was planted lovingly, tended thoughtfully and grew to be almost 20 feet in height. I hope it will continue to live a very long life. 

Mr. and Mrs. Hoyt, my mother, who planted and loved the tree, and my father, who built our playhouse, and all the neighbors are gone now. Only the Gumbo Limbo and I know the stories about that house and the people who lived there. Only the two of us could write those tales. Eventually, we will.

The speed of life

Too fast. The speed of life is too fast. Life speeds up as we age. It seems that way to a lot of people. People who notice, as children, how endless summers soon end too fast, and finally become a mere blur as the school years flow by. Four years of college seem not long enough, and then we're out in the real world. Working, working, time slowing only during the five day work week and then speeding up once again for two brief days of freedom. Freedom to clean our home, wash our clothes, shop for food, and children? Well, not in my area of expertise, but I've been told that life with children equals a definite parallel universe of speeding time running alongside and competing with everything else.
Fast? What is fast? As opposed to slow, it's much faster. The speed of life, the speed of light, the difference? An endless, consecutive series of nows versus 186,000 miles a second or 700 million miles an hour. 
We exist in an ignored, unrealized vacuum of nows. Our nows can be yesterdays, todays or tomorrows but only our nows are constant. Instead of living in our nows, we dwell on our yesterdays and make plans for our tomorrows. Being in the present, by not wasting our nows, is something spiritual, semi-devine earthly beings have been instructing us to do for centuries.
Time flies. Nows fly faster and faster, at the ever increasing speed of life. Surely there is some algorithm somewhere that magically and Einsteinically [my word] explains why this phenomenon happens. There have to be prescribed sets and subsets of numbers and figures, with drawings and arrows, that show how we start as droplets from a faucet, fluidly falling downward, unaware we are simply forming ranks, as we hit bottom, with the already circling masses, speeding up exponentially, as the circles become smaller, until we finally flow down the drain.
Down to where? Is the journey just finding our way back to what we know, as Eliot promises? Is it Churchill's riddle, wrapped in an enigma, shrouded in mystery? Will this mystery be solved at the end (or beginning) of the trip? We share the trait of curiosity with our feline creatures and this is the greatest mystery we've never solved. Faster and faster, round and round, down and down. Curiouser and curiouser. Do we depart or do we commence? It could be the adventure hasn't even started yet.