When Dr. Swami, driving from Jacksonville, crosses the bridge to Amelia Island, he says he feels the mold and spores and allergens in the air.

Sanjay Swami is my allergy doctor and I have become allergic to Amelia Island.

How, say my remaining New York friends, can you suddenly be allergic? You live on the ocean—sea, sand, clean salty air. Yes, but from the river side heave sweating forests, red oaks, their roots gnarly with decaying leaves, mysterious plants oozing scent and spores, rich laden air. Here are wetness, rot, dark canopies of vegetation threaded with snakes through which leap thin black squirrels.

But you have been there twelve years, they say. Why now? Why, indeed?

Even as I sit in the midst of damp wadded Kleenex, rubbing the allergy shiners under my eyes, applying poultices of witch hazel soaked cotton balls, sneezing five times as I try to remember which drug I have taken when, I know that my allergy is somewhat mental.

New York has called me back. I’ve been summoned.

On the occasional Wednesday, I go to Dr. Swami’s office, which is full of my fellow pudding people, all of us turned into damp puddings by our diverse allergies. Inside we are dripping and itching. With sneezes suppressed and nasal passages dried, some sit waiting for their allergy shots. I am not a believer in allergy shots, so instead I have a giant bag of nasal sprays, pills sealed into their silver nodules, eye drops and steroids, which I especially like.

With my steroids, I am filled with manic energy. I begin clearing, throwing out and staging Amelia for a sale. Raven is employed now ,and part if her job is showing a spec house on the beach road that has been professionally staged. It’s full of “if only” magical thinking and fancy finishes. It is clear and bare but also, somehow, complete and ready to go. This is what I hope to achieve as I climb to the top of closets and empty sea chests of papers.

Anton van Dalen’s umbrella with pigeons coming from the spokes hangs from the ceiling. Nearby is his paper hawk twisting in the wind from the terrace. Across the room is the papier-mâché Medusa from Paris and the painting of a man on a beach with his trousers rolled. My art does not look like anything in the saleable spec house. There is also Edward’s office with his wall of fame and Daily News front pages after 9/11 when he was the first to proclaim IT’S WAR. Hundreds of books have arrived here, multiplied, and stayed.

Our place is filled with attitude. It has somehow become, over the years, urban or perhaps it always was.

There is another impediment in that Edward does not want to leave the island until there is a replacement.

Our daughter, now married, has forbidden us Los Angeles and all of California for the present. My dear long ago Miami is slowly sinking. Waters flood the bases of mega towers and architectural masterpieces filled with the rich, corrupt and foreign.

There are still a few ways off the island—the bridges, escape by ocean or the Amelia River, the local airport, death, the clicking together of ruby slippers.

I call the real estate agent who came over the sand in his black shoes and Marcy Mock, who sold us our place. Neither is encouraging about a quick sale at the price I want.

So for now we are lost in space and time in the staged emptiness of Ocean Place.

Before we return to New York for a few months, we go to our favorite restaurant. Chef Kenny Gilbert has opened the wonderful Gilbert’s Underground Kitchen. We walk past the line of black iron smokers outside, breathing deep in the hot sweet smoke. We wait for the ribs, the bucket of fried chicken with pickled vegetables, eating the skillet corn bread and drop biscuits with green tomato jam, the split pea hummus and collard greens. I hoist my jelly jar of wine and, through the wavy glass, I see what I never could see before.

It’s all a question of timing.