last night we bounced roughly back from vieques in the dark smear of midnight. still smelling of salt, J's sleeping hair in my lap as we touch down at JFK, my sister already docking the minivan at the arrivals curb.

vieques was a bright spinning reel of stray dogs, rooster calls and dozens of beaches exposed for our play after the U.S. Navy's pull-out there -- white beaches like an unwrapped present or unweildy prom dress tossed aside. days were a combination of the stylish and ramshackle, and found us traveling from our tangled sheets to the cold pool to pancakes to the beach and so on til night brought weariness down. it was all quite cheap, including our rented jeep with missing fender, coated in mud by day two. the free things were the best: dusty roads, traded words and snorkeling.

snorkeling -- a word as inscrutible as what it signifies. traveling in the undersea, observing and observed by seemingly extra terrestrial living forms: sand worm, eagle ray, sea tortoise, sea fan, brain coral, trigger fish, vase coral, gar. we killed hours just looking, accepting the sunburns that crept over our backs and hamstrings as a just price for the experience.