KEY WEST New Year’s Greetings 2026: How to Say Goodbye?
Sometimes stuff just disappears.
One day I almost reach for the phone to dial up one of my best friends for a walk, but she’s years gone. I still miss her so much.
Another day, I remember that my house burned down. We didn’t own it anymore when it burned down, but it really did go up in flames and I still miss it. I built that basic rambler at the unheard of age of 24, and memories of life events from my years there still pop up, including an invented image of melting kitchen tile. We worked so hard, and laughed so much, as we gooped that gloppy mastic on the walls when we installed that lovely seashell tile!
Other times, we know stuff will disappear soon. A week ago, we learned that our current condo rental just sold. So we may not come to Key West next year, after 22 years of visits. That’s ok, of course: It’s just a place, right? We’ve made ourselves at home in unlikely places over our lifetimes: a single-wide trailer, a mice-infested old Iowa farmhouse, our 30-ft. sailboat’s cramped cabin, and numerous cruise ship ‘homes’ as we crossed vast oceans.
So while we’ll miss our 4th floor condo’s view of Key West’s salt ponds, it’s our Key West friends we will miss most. Those who may not be here when we return. If we return.
I chatted with some of those friends a few nights ago, at the first Impromptu classical concert of Key West’s winter season. Same thing at church the next morning; so many people we’ve come to know. People we’ll miss, if we don’t come back. If they disappear. If we disappear, from this glorious green rock at the end of the road.
We miss so many people from here already. As we sat in our usual third row pew, for instance, we welcomed our new pastor, Gina, who seems absolutely delightful. (She also wears the BEST shoes, and I’m a sucker for cool shoes.)
We will always miss our old pastor Steve, of course, and Allen and Gail. Gail used to sit in the third row aisle seat. Someone new named Randy sits there now, and he’s very nice. He doesn’t know he’s in Gail’s seat, and that’s ok. I don’t plan to tell him.
We never would have found Key West without Allen and Gail, who welcomed us each year to their charming light-splashed historical bungalow, a place filled with laughter, love, and fun.
Oh, Allen was beyond fun. He always had a twinkle in his eye, and that’s not an exaggeration; ask anyone who knew him. We could wander anywhere around town during the day, but we had to promise to be back at the charming bungalow by 5 o’clock sharp. That was happy hour, when Allen, a certified bartender and Baptist clergy, made custom cocktails and Gail served delectable nibbles. Over the years, we hobnobbed with so many fascinating Key West characters during those magical, marvelous happy hours.
A purchaser completely rebuilt that bungalow two years ago, and now it’s a high-end vacation rental for deep pocketed renters. The custom-built bar cabinet?
Disappeared.
They named the place Satisfy My Soul. Oh dear. We toured the trendy remodel last year, and they remodeled the personality right out of that little place. The soul, I’d say. Not one review on VRBO yet, so new renters don’t seem to be finding much soul there either. The ‘soul’ of the little cottage has disappeared, along with our old friends.
Today, this is happening all over town: One day, construction trucks pull up in front of a ramshackle bungalow, and a year later the shiny remodel sits empty several months of the year, rented out during the winter season to wealthy out-of-towners from up North. Where did the people who used to fill the place with life and love go?
Probably somewhere more affordable, since today Key West is astronomically expensive, especially for normal-income vacation renters like us*. (*…and year-round residents, who are priced out of monthly rentals by vacation renters, which happen to be…..us. Ironic, isn’t it?) And If you think I’m exaggerating, just check the price on a monthly rental in the listing, above …..good lordy!!!
We’ve moved through five monthly rentals during the past fourteen years, and even if they morphed into year-round residential homes, as our Poorhouse Lane rental did, developers working for the deep-pocketed folks loom nearby. Check out that cigarmaker cottage rental today, where a possum lived under the floorboards and our grandchildren swam under the stars until their fingertips wrinkled (all at an affordable monthly rental price, I might add).
That lovely pool now sits hemmed in on both sides, by two-story tall boxes towering over the bungalow’s tiny backyard. Joe’s shack disintegrates down on the corner, since he’s still hanging on in the local nursing home. Joe, a Poorhouse Lane institution, used to sit on his blue front porch all day and regale passerby with stories of Key West past. His postcard-sized patch of Old Town land is worth a king’s ransom now, so we expect to see another bland box go up in that space soon enough. We bet it won’t be blue.
At first we only half believed Joe’s stories, but after I looked up a name he mentioned often – Jim Herlithy, the author of the book Midnight Cowboy – and found our Joe’s name quoted in Herlithy’s New York Times obituary, we paid more attention. Turns out, Poorhouse Lane Joe was a close Key West friend of Jim Herlithy. (Joe’s stories of how he perched in a tree to watch Burt Lancaster filming scenes for The Rose Tattoo were probably true, as well.)
Everybody’s talkin’ at me, I can’t hear a word they say. I’m going where the sun keeps shining, through the pouring rain, where the weather suits my clothes. Harry Nillson, for the movie Midnight Cowboy
Now, every time I play Everybody’s Talking, I think of our old neighbor Joe. This song, from the movie based on Herlithy’s book Midnight Cowboy, is foundational to our Key West experience, since it shows up in regular rotation on our Promised Land playlist. This list includes all the songs we play as we roll in and roll out of Key West each year.
(Yes of course Margaritaville is on the list. Parrotheads never die.)
The Midnight Cowboy character, Rizzo, dies riding in the back of a bus on his way to the Florida Keys, his ‘promised land’ during a hardscrabble life filled with longing and regret. Rizzo never makes it to the Keys, but he tries. At least he tried.
So we’ll keep trying to reach our promised land, wherever that might be, despite other unsettling changes not only here in Key West, but across our country, the country that was my great-grandmother’s promised land. Sophia left Sweden/Finland by ship, and trekked cross-country by train to reach Seattle, where she sewed eleven quilts for her eleven American grandchildren, one of which I still possess today.
In addition to the ordinary losses of life, we grieve the loss of a country where a pauper-poor immigrant Swedish farmgirl, as well as her schoolteacher great-granddaughter, could build their own homes in their early 20s. (…and vacation in Key West. Who would have ever thought?) The United States we grew up in welcomed our ancestors, and that’s why we always felt a bit of specialness, a bit of pride, as we found our place in the “U.S. passport holder” line.
Yet today, so many people have reason to fear a border crossing, or fear a step into the street outside their own front doors. A Key West worker fears a trip to the grocery store, for instance: She holds a green card, one that’s due for renewal, and she fears she’ll be swooped up in an immigration raid to be deported far from her Key West home, the only home she’s known for years and years.
Many of our Key West workers, here under the Temporary Protected Status for Haiti order, are in fear of February 3rd, 2026, right now, when their protection expires due to a November order by our federal government. Exclusionary policies like this cancellation are now at work everywhere in America, and people everywhere have reason to be scared.
It’s not just the workers with temporary status that are scared anymore either. Today, even our closest friends – white, with pensions and all that – bring up the topic of whether or not to move overseas, and that’s just weird. Whoever thought that everyday Americans might seek to flee, the same way our ancestors fled Europe? We never imagined that. And we simply don’t know what will happen tomorrow, let alone next year.
So maybe we should just get on with it? Just let the past go, and move on? Accept that this is how America is going to be now – mean, violent, exclusionary – and get used to it?
Naw. Not yet.
We’re still going to fight, even if that fight might be a lovefest fight filled with potent images, inflatable cartoon characters, art, and poetry. While it might not look like much of a fight just yet, give it time.
Key West has started fighting back with images of rainbows, for instance. When the State of Florida scrubbed away our rainbow crosswalks recently in their attempts to erase a potent symbol of inclusion, guess what happened? That State action prompted a profusion of rainbows around town: In windows, on bike racks, painted on fences, in parks, in gardens. Rainbows everywhere. So many rainbows, so many more than we’ve ever seen before.
Rainbows alone won’t change what’s happening in our country or protect our Haitian workers from deportation, of course. We know that. Yet other things, like poetry, just might. Anyone who says poems and love don’t hold enormous power missed a few history lessons, I’d say. (…how John Milton’s Paradise Lost inspired early American revolutionaries, anyone?)
Here are a few lines from Amanda Gorman’s new poem, written in response to Renee Nicole Good’s killing by an I.C.E. agent on January 7th, 2026:
Now, bare riot of flowers,
Pure howling of hymns.
If for us she arose,
Somewhere, in the pitched deep of our grief,
Crouches our power,
The howl where we begin,
Straining upon the edge of the
Crooked crater
Of the worst of what we’ve been.
Power indeed.
So no, we aren’t ready to say goodbye to the country we believe in, but maybe we should just get on with it, if by it I mean accepting the fact that the country we thought we knew is in the process of disappearing, as so many other beloved things from our lives have disappeared in the past. And we have to fight for it.
I think that might be right, and I believe that Amanda Gorman speaks truth when she says that in our pitched deep grief lies our greatest power. When we know something we love is about to disappear forever, we’ll scratch and kick and caterwaul and paint a million more rainbows to protect it, no matter what the cost.
That’s because when we realize what we might lose, we love it more intensely than ever before. Comedian Stephen Colbert* (*one of my fave spiritual mentors) captured this idea so well when he talked about his love for America:
“At a certain point…I realized that, in some ways, we were doing a late-night comedy show about loss. And that’s related to love, because sometimes you can only truly know how much you love something when you get a sense that you might be losing it.” Stephen Colbert
Amen to that.
We do so love Key West, and America, and we always will.
So thanks everyone, for following along. Stay tuned for Part II, all about the Key West we’ve come to know and love, soon! (if you haven’t subscribed yet, you can do so now at our home page, so you don’t miss it. Key West is so photogenic I have oodles of wonderful photos I just have to share – here are just a few more, for now.
