Dining al fresco is one of the island habits we’ve adopted.
What is the difference between celebrating Labor Day weekend on a small island than in a large city?
Travel and Traffic. You don’t really have to go anywhere. And the guests you have can walk over, and some do.
In Atlanta, neither of us had a deck. It turns out Melissa would eat outside in the dead of winter if she could tolerate my whining. And so it’s al fresco dining for any warm-weather holiday.
This weekend, it was one of my favorites, low-country boil. I do love the sausages. And the corn and the potatoes and the shrimp (dipped in garlic butter) and the coleslaw (made with pineapple and coconut).
I do not, however, eat of the crab. Melissa loves crab legs. So we have them.
We call the deck, off the back porch, our dining room.
If the squirrels aren’t peeling pinecones high up in the tree and dropping the scales onto the table, and sometimes into our food, it’s basically pest free.
squirrel scaling a pinecone
This year, though, the squirrels are especially busy. Some say it portends a long winter. All I know is that I do enjoy shooting my B-B pistol at the little grey rodents. They also raid our bird feeder. Twenty shots might eventually discourage them from eating over our table, though I doubt I have ever hit one. And if I did, it would do no harm.
No, I do not shoot during dinner.
While the occasional fly will remind us that we are indeed eating al fresco, we never have mosquitoes, even though our backyard merges into the marsh.
We spray, of course. “Better living through chemicals” is one of my favorite expressions, which I last tossed out at the owner of Tybee’s experimental vegan pastry shop. She didn’t have Sweet & Low as a matter of principle. To which I proclaimed my version of the DuPont slogan.
The experiment in trying to sell bad-tasting pastries and luke-warm coffee sweetened with some natural not-so-sweet flavoring ended as almost anyone on Tybee, except a vegan or a vegan’s mother, could have predicted.
It didn’t matter that the vegan bakery had an outdoor deck.
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