We are Walt and Marjorie. We were born in Ohio, we were married in Ohio in 1958, we raised three children in Ohio, and in March of 1996, at the ages of 63 and 61, we sold the house in Ohio and moved to the Florida Keys, where we had gone on vacation every February since 1979 and where we had said, every February, "someday." Someday came. This page is for the people back home who keep writing to ask if we've come to our senses yet. We have not. Here's what it's like.

It's a stilt house. That means the living part sits about ten feet up on concrete pilings, and underneath is open: the cars, the boat trailer, the washer and dryer, a workbench, and nothing we would cry over if the water came through, which is the point. You go up a flight of outside stairs to get to the front door. Marjorie's knees have opinions about this and I tell her it's why she's in better shape than her sister.

Two bedrooms, one bath, a kitchen, a front room, and a screened porch across the whole back that looks at the water. That porch is where we live. It's where the coffee is in the morning, where I clean fish, where Marjorie reads, where company sits. The house is small by Ohio standards; the house we sold had a basement bigger than this whole place. We don't miss the basement. We don't miss the furnace, either, or the snow shovel, or the storm windows, all of which I've mentioned to my brother-in-law more than once.

We won't say exactly where. The Keys are a string of islands about 110 miles long with one road, U.S. 1, running down the middle from the mainland to Key West, and the addresses are given by mile marker. We're in the middle Keys, which is the stretch around the big bridge. That's close enough for the Internet.

This is the reason I wanted to come and I'll be honest about it. I have a 17-foot skiff with a 70-horse outboard, which is a small boat for these waters and the right size for a man my age to handle alone. Most mornings the wind allows, I'm out by seven and back by eleven with supper.

What we catch, in the plain language of a fellow who fished for bluegill in a farm pond for fifty years:

• Yellowtail snapper and mangrove snapper on the patch reefs, on light tackle with a little chum in the water. Good eating, and Marjorie's favorite. This is most of what we eat.
• Grouper down deeper on the reef and the wrecks, on heavier gear. A big one will take you into the rocks if you let it think about it.
• Dolphin (the fish, not the animal; they call it mahi-mahi in the restaurants so the tourists don't cry) out in the Gulf Stream in the spring and summer, under the weed lines and the birds. That's a longer run than I usually make alone, so I go with a neighbor who has a bigger boat.
• Tarpon around the bridges in the spring. You don't eat them; you fight them for an hour and let them go and then you sit down. I've landed two in three years and I think about both of them every day.
• Spiny lobster in season, diving with a mask and snorkel in shallow water, with a tickle stick and a net. The regular season runs from August 6 to the end of March, and there's a special two-day sport season for the recreational folks the last Wednesday and Thursday in July that turns the whole island chain into a parking lot. We stay home that week.
• Stone crab claws from October 15 to May 15. A neighbor has traps. You take one claw and put the crab back and it grows another. I did not believe this in Ohio.

You need a Florida saltwater license, and the size and bag limits change, so I keep the current rule sheet in the boat and read it, because the marine patrol also reads it. There's a fellow with a fly fishing page here on GeoCities who fishes cold water, which I did for fifty years, and I read it and I feel for him. Also a charter captain's page down in South Beach, if you want somebody to take you out who knows more than I do.

People from Ohio ask about the heat the way people from here ask about the snow. Here is the truth. From about May through October it is 88 to 92 degrees every day and the humidity is such that a glass of iced tea sweats a ring on the table in a minute and a half. It does not cool off much at night. The trade-off is that it is almost never over 95 here, because there's water on every side, so it's more even than an August in Ohio, where I have cut hay at 100.

The winter is the reason. From December through March it's 70 to 78 in the daytime, sunny most days, with a breeze, and I fish in a T-shirt on New Year's Day and call my brother-in-law to tell him about it. That's the phone call the whole move was for.

Other things nobody tells you: the no-see-ums, which are tiny biting gnats that come out at dawn and dusk when the wind drops, and the mosquitoes in the wet months, which the county sprays for from a plane. Screens are not optional. The sun will burn you through a shirt. Everything metal rusts: the car, the boat trailer, the hinges on the screen door, my good pliers. You learn to rinse things.

Hurricane season runs June 1 to November 30, and from about the middle of August until the middle of October you watch the weather the way a farmer does. It's the price of the winter. Everybody here knows it. The house has shutters for every window, in the shed, numbered, and it takes the two of us three hours to put them all up. We have done it four times in three years. Three of those, the storm went somewhere else.

The fourth was Hurricane Georges, in September of 1998, a year ago this week. It came up through the Caribbean doing terrible damage in the islands, and when it became clear it was headed for the Keys, the county ordered an evacuation: visitors first, then the residents. There is one road out. When they tell you to go, you go, because if you wait, you're on that road with everybody else and the storm.

We put up the shutters on Wednesday morning, put the boat on the trailer and the trailer under the house tied to the pilings, put the photo albums, the papers and the cat in the car, and drove north with the rest of the Keys. It took five hours to get to the mainland. We stayed with our daughter's college roommate's family in Ocala, who we had never met and who took us in like relatives. The storm crossed the lower Keys on Friday, the 25th, with the worst of it at Key West, and then went on into the Gulf.

We came home Tuesday. Our island had wind and water but nothing like what Key West got. Our house stood, as it was built to. The screens on the porch were gone, and a good deal of the porch roof. Six boards were off the dock. The downstairs was full of seaweed and a neighbor's lawn furniture. Two houses down, a fellow lost his roof. Boats were up in people's yards. The power was off for the better part of a week and we ate what was in the freezer, in order, with the neighbors, on the porch with no screens, and I will tell you it was one of the better weeks we have had here. Everybody helped everybody. We had the porch rebuilt by Thanksgiving.

Would we go through it again? We will, probably, someday; that's the deal you make when you live here. But we'll leave when they say leave. We saw the pictures from the islands where people couldn't.

More than Ohio. Anyone who tells you Florida is cheap has not lived on a rock at the end of a hundred-mile road. Everything we eat or use came down that road on a truck, and the price shows it; groceries run maybe a quarter higher than at home. Our drinking water comes through a pipeline from the mainland, and the water bill reminds you. Homeowner's insurance, and the separate windstorm insurance you need down here, is the biggest single cost we have and it went up again after Georges. Property taxes are real. Gas costs more. A haircut costs more.

On the other side: Florida has no state income tax, which for two retired people on a pension and Social Security is not nothing. We have no heating bill. We have one car instead of two, because there is nowhere to drive. We eat fish I caught four or five nights a week. We don't buy winter clothes, or salt for the driveway, or a snowblower, or plane tickets to somewhere warm in February, because we are somewhere warm in February.

It nets out, roughly, to a little more than we were spending in Ohio, for a smaller house and a bigger life. We'd do it again. If you're thinking about it: rent for a year first, and rent in August, not February. If you still want to come after an August, you'll be fine.

Our street is fourteen houses, about half of them full-time and half of them snowbirds who come down after Christmas. Every Sunday at five, year-round, whoever's here brings a dish to whoever's turn it is, and we eat on somebody's porch. It started before we got here and it will go on after. It's how we learned who to call about the outboard, who had a generator, and who needed one after the storm.

The regulars: a retired Navy chief and his wife from Virginia, a couple from Michigan who ran a hardware store, a widow from Quebec who's here October to May, a schoolteacher from Miami who came down twenty years ago for a summer, and a young couple who work at the marina and are the only ones under sixty. And the two Ohioans.

What gets brought: smoked fish dip (everybody has a recipe, everybody's is best), conch fritters, whatever I caught, somebody's key lime pie (real ones are yellow, not green; a green one means food coloring and a tourist), Marjorie's Ohio potato salad, which has become famous down here for being, as the chief puts it, "a serious potato salad." And the sunset, which is on the menu every week and is free.

Marjorie's sister Ruth writes every two weeks, and has since we left. Ruth would not want the whole letters on the Internet, but she gave permission for these lines, which we think give the flavor.

"Eleven inches Tuesday and the plow didn't come until Thursday. Don is fine. His back is not fine. I told him you'd said to get the boy next door to do it and he said what boy, and I said the one who's been next door for six years, Don." (January 1997)

"The church is doing the pancake breakfast again and they asked about Walt's griddle and I said Walt's griddle is in Florida cooking fish, and Pastor said, well, tell him we're praying for him, and I don't think he meant it kindly." (March 1998)

"We watched the storm on the news every night and I did not sleep. Call me the minute you're home. Call collect. I don't care." (September 1998)

"The maples are turning and it's the prettiest week of the year and I know you don't have that. I know you don't have the snow either. I'm just saying." (October 1998)

"When are you coming home? I know, I know. I ask anyway. Don says to say hello and to ask if the tarpon thing is true." (August 1999)

The tarpon thing is true, Don.

We miss the grandchildren, and that's the real one, and we go up for two weeks every June and they come down for two weeks every March, and it's not the same as Sunday dinner and we know it. We miss the fall. Marjorie misses her sister and her church. I miss the hardware store on Main Street where they knew what I needed before I did.

But we are 66 and 64 years old, and we get up every morning in a place we spent seventeen years wishing we lived, and I'm on the water by seven, and the coffee's on the porch, and at five o'clock on Sunday there are twelve people who'd notice if we didn't show up. No regrets. Somebody had to be the ones who actually went. It was us.

If you're thinking about doing it, write. We'll tell you the truth, including August.