State of Piratas XXXV: Can you believe it?

Here we are, a full 3 years later. This began as an attempt to run a guesthouse that encouraged individual cultural submersion while discouraging time-wasting, easy-way-out traveler-clique habits (status update: FAIL). Marriage and long-termers transformed the project into somewhat of a modern-day hippie-commune, with tourists passing through and taking pictures of the kid and the dog and the walls just like they did at the Sugar Loaf. The sound of Father Time's footsteps, combined with a weariness toward spoiled malcontents, led to an emotional abandoning of the project's future, with all optimism and forward-thinking focused on property sale, and with it reinvention. Yet here we are. Here we still are. A half-block from Heaven, but forever just a half-block.

In Y3, 1,990 different guests spent at least a night in the house. 10 shy of a nice milestone, but about a full month's worth more than Y2. It was enough... more than enough. Y3 brought us Ravi, Paul, Susan, Laura, Marlon, Dan... good people, very good people with whom we are better off for having partied. We mixed more than our share of caipirinhas, soaked up more than our share of sunshine, wasted far more than our share of hours on idle daydreams and labored far less than our rightful share of hours in the cogs of the machine of society.

Now we sit at a very critical point (within the context of our very un-critical lives, you understand), our tiptoes curled 'round a tightrope between action & inaction. We have foolishly let the potential of property sale seduce us, and we wake from that spell (at least I wake from that spell) to find, many months later, that realization still a half-block away. In the meantime the 'house- never exactly a state-of-the-art structure- has fallen so hopelessly into disrepair that our clientele now exclusively consists of vagabonds, tramps, gypsies and thieves. In other words, don't name your place "Piratas" if you wanna attract mermaids. Name it, for example, "MERMAIDS".

But Rafa's return has rejuvenated us. Like a flash of conscience, his energy and goodwill have forced us to look in the mirror and feel the burn of the shame of our laziness. Afterall, we live here. Our original success did not come from trying to please strangers, but from creating a place that we enjoyed. If we can get back to that, they'll come back to us.

And so the gutter has been fixed, the crumbling wall knocked down, and this week will see fresh paint, new, reinforced mattress covers, and every room cleaned by gloved hand with the toxins to kill all the little terrorist critters who hide in the dark corners of the walls and the frames. Today Priscilla is making a feijoada meal for anyone who'd like to partake, and tonight we'll have a birthday cake to celebrate the bounty of June: Eva, Marte, Francisco, me and the partnership that gives life to this blog.

Maybe we'll get lucky. Maybe the Italian guy will snatch up this place to construct a hotel. Maybe one of the agencies eager for the commission will find a future-minded, deep-pocketed purchaser. Maybe that'll happen this afternoon, or next week, or next month. But if it does, I know it will feel a lot sweeter if, in the time we have left, we can restore this place to the glory days of not-so-long-ago, when the only thing disrupting your quiet night's slumber was the racket from the caipirinha class downstairs, and the only reason to stay somewhere else was that we didn't have any more room back by the pool.