The Key West Mystique
Key West Island News
Key West Island News connects Key West residents and friends of the island, fosters our One Human Family culture and advances understanding of shared goals for our island community
Linda Grist Cunningham | Columns and news analysis
Key West Island News editor Linda Grist Cunningham has written more than 4,000 columns — in print and on the web — since 1968. She hates writing and is compelled to do it anyway.
Key West clutter | Or, how to downsize — again
It has become embarrassingly obvious I can no longer roll my eyes when I stumble into a pile of stuff Ranger Ed says he might need someday. What I call Key West clutter when it's HIS stuff morphs into priceless stuffed pillows and ancient quilts with threadbare...
Key West summer | The things that didn’t happen
Grumble Season is fewer than 10 days away. That gives me a 10-day window to wrap up the 2023 Key West summer, followed by three months of Grumble Season, in which I am inclined toward cross words while I wait for December, which is a great month to live in Key West....
Jimmy Buffett | The baby boomers’ love affair with youth
The penultimate track on side one of Jimmy Buffett's 1981 album, Coconut Telegraph, is "Growing Older But Not Up," a sing-a-long-able earwig that 30-something baby boomers would carry with them for at least the next four decades. I'm growing older but not upMy...
Gotta a court date? You might need to plan a trip to Miami
These days it's darn near impossible to find something Floridians agree on. We shed our collaborative shades of purple back around the time of hanging chads and we've filled closets with red or blue since. Note the "or" because we don't do both in 2023. But somewhere...
Census 2023 data | Demographics may predict our Key West future
There really is such a thing as the Key West state of mind. Whether you were born here, or first met Key West in 1970 or just a few weeks ago, those who love the island will never stray far. The Key West mystique is captured in every Jimmy Buffett song, in every step...
The Lahaina fire | Lessons for a vulnerable Key West
Could a Lahaina-style fire destroy Key West? Crikey, could I ask a more naive question? The answer's simple: With the tiniest spark of an e-bike battery -- or my toaster -- gone rogue, and whoosh. I don't have to ask the fire department, the mayor, the city manager or...
Dear Connor is a collection of columns Linda writes for her grandson, Connor. Though he may never read them, they help her make sense of the world.
Dismantling the 14th Amendment: Keeping it upbeat in Key West when the world isn’t
I love my Key West Bubble, but national dissonance is dribbling through today. I am unsettled at the prospect of living through the dismantling of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The 14th Amendment, ratified by the states in 1868, can be boiled down to this: Oops, when we wrote the Constitution and the Bill of Rights (the first 10 amendments), we were thinking only of straight white men with money. Perhaps we need to fix that?
Dear Connor | As the American democracy unravels, can there be hope for your future?
American history is filled with "times like these." Three times we have been here. I believe we will be OK. Though my rage boils over too often, I believe in Americans-in-the-middle. I believe there are extremists on the right and the left -- and I believe they do not, do not, represent who we are as a people. They get the attention and the headlines today; spoiled children clamoring for their own ice cream cone, unwilling to share and willing to fight to the death to keep what they believe is theirs and theirs alone. Getting through this transition will not be for the faint of heart. But get through we will.
Hurricane Irma | In September 2017, Linda Grist Cunningham created and launched a Facebook Page that aggregated news coverage during Hurricane Irma. She was off-island at the time visiting her mother in Virginia. Her husband remained in Key West. Over the three weeks that she and her partner journalists John Teets maintained around-the-clock coverage, they reached almost a million people around the world. These are the columns she wrote each day. Hurricane Season is always June 1 – Nov. 30.
Hurricane Irma | 5 years that changed Key West and the Keys
Once a month I drive to Marathon and back for a board meeting. I've done that since before Hurricane Irma clobbered Key West and the Florida Keys on Sept. 10, 2017. For five years that 100 mile round trip has been my gauge for our recovery from...
Hurricane Irma: 9-23-17: Closing up shop. Saying Godspeed. Going home to the Cat 5s
When we launched Key West Hurricane Irma, our online news coverage, we weren’t sure when “quit” would happen. We were confident we'd know. Today is the anniversary of knowing. It was time to wish our house guests farewell and Godspeed.
