The Minnesotan at the bar is looking at me like I've just claimed to have grown up on the moon.

"You grew up here? In Key West?"

Yes.

"Like, actually here? As a kid?"

As a kid. As a teenager. On these streets, in this heat, under this sun. Key West was not a destination. It was Tuesday.

The Spanish called it Cayo Hueso. Island of Bones. They found the place covered in human remains when they arrived in the early 1500s, left there by the Calusa, who had been fishing these waters for centuries before anyone from Europe thought to look. The Calusa didn’t farm. They fished, hunted, built their houses on stilts over the water, and made tools from conch shells. They were good at war. When Juan Ponce de León sailed in looking to claim things, the Calusa swarmed his ships in war canoes and drove him off. He came back in 1521. A Calusa arrow caught him in the thigh, poisoned with sap from the manchineel tree. He made it to Cuba. He died there. The Navy arrived in the 1820s because Key West sits at the northern edge of the deepwater channel between the Atlantic and the Gulf, ninety miles from Cuba, and whoever controlled this water controlled a great deal else. They called it the Gibraltar of the West. The Calusa had understood this long before the Navy had a name for it. The Calusa were eventually wiped out not by conquest but by European disease, and the last of them were relocated to Cuba by the Spanish in 1763. They left behind bones and shell mounds and the name of the place. Everyone who came after them has been trying to figure out what to do with this particular strip of limestone and water ever since.

Lanying and I just got back from a month in the Keys. A month: the RV, the cat, the Chinese restaurant we've been going to for thirty years, the morning walks before the tourists are up. When I mention this to people from out of state there is a silence that precedes the kind of reverence usually reserved for cancer survivors and astronauts. A whole month. In the Keys.

Yes. The whole month. We got there on a Tuesday. Parked. Went to eat. Went to sleep. It was fine. It was more than fine. It was home, approximately.

That last part is the thing Minnesotans cannot process.