Today, before practice, our 7 year old daughter stood before me on our carpeted floor, one foot fidgeting on the other and her hands clasped in front of her. She looked embarrassed, or worried. I waited.
“We have to do butterfly in the meet,” she said.
She started swimming yesterday with the Blacksburg Orcas, our local parks and recreation summer swim team, and she has her first meet on Thursday. I stopped packing my poolside bag of reading material. “You don’t want to race butterfly, do you.”
She looked at the floor. “Not really.” She swung her shoulders, her little face serious. She fretted her thumbs, flapped her knee. Then she stopped. She dropped her hands to her sides and planted her bare feet on the soft carpet. She looked up at me and said, “I’ll have to swim butterfly if I go to the Olympics.” And her mind was made.
She walked across the room to her swim bag and talked to herself. She gestured with her right hand, palm up, as if explaining something to someone. “I need to watch more swim meets. I’ve got to see how they do butterfly. And I need to watch more Olympics.” She bent over and rifled through her bag. Towel: check. Goggles: check. Swim cap: check.
Over her shoulder she said, “Mom, isn’t there a summer Olympics? Is it soon?”
I smiled, thrilled by her determination, wondering if this is how Olympians begin. “Not til 2016, sweetie.” I put my hand on her back and nudged her towards the door. As I locked up she continued her self-chatter, swinging her swim bag, gesturing persuasively, pumping herself up to swim butterfly.
Today I braided our daughter’s hair. She is growing her bangs out, and they are at that stage where they are too long to leave hanging but still to short to tuck behind her ear. I attempted a French braid on one side to tidy the scraggly strands, and with her hair pulled back, her face is bright. I cannot stop gazing at her tawny tanned skin, and gold-flecked hazel eyes, and honey blonde hair against her crisp white shirt as she sits on her grandmother’s lap. She is golden and summery, innocent and beautiful, and I wish I could stop time, to stay in this moment of her childhood forever.
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The sky is blue again now that the storm blew through. Palm fronds sway gently and white puffs drift across the sky. Morning is my favorite time of day on vacation. I sip coffee on the balcony while my family sleeps in. I watch the sky and listen to wind in the palms. Mourning doves coo, and in the distance, waves pound the beach. Across the street, a screen door slaps shut behind a woman with a corn broom. In a white crushed-shell yard shaded by palms and broad banana leaves, she sweeps her walk. Her husband pushes open the screen door, and it slaps shut behind him, too. He stands on the welcome mat and sips coffee from a curved white mug to be in her company. They do not speak, and their faces are smooth and relaxed as they absorb the quiet morning. Broom corn bristles swiff across red brick, and I love the scouring sound. It is rustic, and welcoming, and I am glad she chose the gentle broom instead of a roaring leaf blower.
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It is our final day of vacation. I drink coffee on the beach, my feet buried in sand, in a low rainbow-striped folding chair, the kind with aluminum tubing and a seat that brushes the sand when you sit in it. Sitting in the cool shade of an Australian pine, early enough that morning sun behind me casts the tree’s shadow across the beach and into waves, I look across blue-green chop to the horizon. The wind coming off the Gulf of Mexico blows the brim of my straw hat up in front, and white puffs of clouds float over the sea. I think of Ernest Hemingway, and how well he wrote these waters in his Key West and Cuba days. I envy his fiction, that he had stories to accompany this backdrop, drama to set upon this stage. An excuse to capture this landscape in an art that transcends time. I wish, as I sit and absorb the scene, that I had such stories in me.
One of the things I love most about Florida, that I miss when I’m away, and that I fall in love with all over again when I return, is the sky. More specifically, I love the clouds. Cloudscapes in Florida are dynamic and dependable. Nearly every afternoon in summer, formations build before your eyes in a blue sky, their faces to the brilliant Florida sun. The piles are clean and bright, like bleached cotton, and you can actually watch them grow, billowy cumulus clouds piling up like a massive mound of shaving cream in a crystalline sky. Variations of light on the clouds are dramatic, ranging from a blinding white on the uppermost billows to an ominous blue black on their low underbellies.
Every day, the clouds are different. Sometimes they are far away, and they move across the sky like giant jellyfish, trailing rain like dark gray tentacles. Other times you watch them grow, you feel the wind pick up as they become cumulonimbus storm clouds, sucking air into their growing system, and you wonder, is that coming our way?
And then that blue-black underbelly is right there,and it blots out the sun. The temperature drops. The menacing cloud is low, right above you. You can see details of its texture, and there is a sense of immediacy – the cloud isn’t over there, where I can watch it from afar. It is right here, like that tree and this lizard, and like me.
A bolt of lightning blinds you, and a clap of thunder cracks, and you feel the ground and your chest vibrate with the impact. Maybe you’ll get scared if you’re outside, and you’ll run for cover. If you’re inside you watch rain pelt hot asphalt and green palm fronds. The storm will crash violently, with thunder and lightning and rain so heavy you have to pull off the highway if you’re driving in it.
Ten minutes later, maybe twenty, it will all be over. The road will steam. The palm fronds will glisten. The sky will clear for sunset, leaving a few cloud remnants, maybe some high cirrus feathers, to reflect pinks and oranges of the sun’s fiery farewell as it drops below the horizon.
And then, you forget about clouds for a while. At least until the next day, when you see a couple of white puffs here and there in the morning. And at 2 o’clock you look inland, and you see a curve of white above palm trees, a great dollop of cloud that grows before your eyes, and you pause in what you’re doing to watch the show.
Gulf of Mexico on a June morning, Anna Maria Island, Florida
Last night, after drinking rum drinks all afternoon, I announced to my husband, “I’m going for a run in the morning.” I rubbed my bloated belly. I packed everything I need for running – shoes, shorts, sports bras, iPod, running watch – and after a week of vacation eating (and drinking), and after a gluttonous day at Disney, all my gear still lay unused on the floor of the closet.
“Okaaay,” he said.
“Just saying it out loud so I’ll do it.”
I woke with the first rays of the sun, pulled on my running clothes, and sneaked silently out of our still sleeping condo. I headed across the street, away from the beach, started my stopwatch, and picked my feet up into a run. Poinciana trees and frangipani are in bloom on Anna Maria Island, and I ran neighborhood streets to see the lush greens and bright flowers of tropical plants. I often run on the beach while we’re here because I feel like I should – I always see runners on the beach and think, “Wow, what an idyllic place to run. Look at the scenery!” But the fact is, when I run on the beach my socks fill with sand, the slope hurts my ankles, and my heels sink in the softness, making the already arduous task of running even more annoying. Plus, it’s kind of torturous to be so hot and sweaty and miserable with all that turquoise water right next to me tempting me to abandon the run and just go swimming.
I jogged to the other side of the island – only about three blocks – to Marina Drive and ran up and down fingers of land separated by canals. Brown anole lizards skittered across driveways in the soft morning light, and a scarab beetle inched its way across 69th Street. I felt like the beetle when I looked at my watch and saw I had only been running 11 minutes.
Sweat trickled down my back as the sun rose over palm trees and its already strong rays struck my skin. I focused on oleander bushes in islanders’ yards and remembered of the oleanders my mom always grew on the coast of Georgia. Their fragrance was cool and sweet today in the warm morning air. I surveyed landscaping strategies as I ran by each home. The plants reminded me of landscaping our homes when we lived in Florida, of swiping sweat from our foreheads as we wandered native plant nurseries, piling coonties and porterweed, milkweed and firebushes onto our green pull cart.
When I finally turned around to head back to the condo, I started thinking about my reward for running on vacation. I ducked under the broad round leaves of an overhanging sea grape and trotted through St. Augustine grass to the docks along Marina Drive. I’ll take my hat off first, then my iPod and watch. I’ll hide those in my hat so nobody steals them. I glanced in the water between boat slips and saw a red hibiscus flower floating on the dark glassy surface. I looked beneath a dock and saw another, then another. They reminded me of Chinese lanterns floating down a river.
Then I’ll peel of my shoes, and then my socks. I passed a boat named Hanky Panky and smiled. A hibiscus flower floated next to it. The scene made me want to listen to Jimmy Buffett and drink more rum. Sweat trickled from my hair-line down my jaw. Only two more blocks til I earn my prize. I gasped in the hot sun. I’ll take my hair down, so it won’t get tangled in the elastic.
Finally, as soon as my feet launched off the sidewalk of 72nd Street and landed on the asphalt of Gulf Drive, I stopped running. I panted and shook sweat off my arms as I walked across to the condo parking lot. I yanked off my hat and pulled ear buds out of my ear. I nestled my watch and iPod in my hat as I walked the short block over bleached pavement to the beach. At the edge of a sandy path through the dunes, I peeled off my running shoes, then my socks. I pulled my hair from its ponytail and made a little pile of belongings at the base of a sand dune. Then I walked across white sand into the beryl waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
The water soothed my Disney-sore feet, and as soon as I was knee-deep, I dove in. My nylon running shorts fluttered underwater and I turned onto my back, my face to the morning sun. At 7:30 am, the beach was empty, and I was the only person in the water.
I floated in the calm sea, my palms up, my feet dangling, and the cool water was a balm on my hot skin. The Gulf was the perfect refreshment after a hot summer run in Florida, and I could feel my core temperature come down as the sea chilled my scalp. The salt water buoyed me, and I bobbed gently without any effort on my part. My hair drifted around my head, and with my ears underwater, I heard the muffled sloshing of wavelets on sand. I opened my eyes as I floated there and saw white terns swoop overhead. Laughing gulls, with black heads and black wing tips, circled and dived. I turned my head toward shore and saw a great blue heron idle near a fisherman’s bucket. A white ibis, with a curved orange bill, glided over the shallows to join it.
I floated there silently for a long time, alone in the cool calm of morning, blue sky above, blue water beneath, white sand to receive me when I was done. The reason I bring my running shoes. My reward for exercising on vacation.
Egg casings, shells, and turtle grass: storm surge deposits on beach after Tropical Storm Andrea
The morning after Tropical Storm Andrea blew through, we rushed out to see what the Gulf of Mexico had deposited on the beach where we are vacationing. An ecological disturbance like that provides a rare, fleeting opportunity to find a bounty of sea life and new shells washed ashore. We got out early because we knew the beach would be crawling with other explorers picking over the seashells, just like we planned to do.
Mother of pearl inside pen shell
Dead Man’s Finger (orange sponge) washed ashore on Anna Maria Island after Tropical Storm Andrea
Variegated sea urchin on Holmes beach after Tropical Storm Andrea
Shells and waves on Anna Maria Island Gulf beach after Tropical Storm Andrea
Sea star washed ashore on Anna Maria Island after Tropical Storm Andrea
Lightning Whelk egg casing and purple sea urchin on Gulf beach after Tropical Storm Andrea
Horse conch egg casing on Gulf beach at Anna Maria Island after Tropical Storm Andrea
Sea pork (orange speckled blob) washed ashore on Southwest Florida beach after Tropical Storm Andrea
Sea pens, shells, and turtle grass on Gulf beach after Tropical Storm Andrea
Sea weed and shells on Anna Maria Island Florida Gulf beach after Tropical Storm Andrea
Tiny white starfish on pen shell, found on beach after Tropical Storm Andrea
Yesterday, and most days here at Anna Maria, the beach is a smooth expanse of white sand dotted with coquina shells, calico scallops, jingles, and venus clams. But this morning when we stepped onto the wet sand, purple plastic beach bucket in hand, the shells on the beach were so abundant, they hurt our feet to walk on them. They glistened, wet with sea water, like pale pink pearls and polished ivory. Barnacle-encrusted pen shells – intact bivalve husks eight inches long and shaped like mussels, brown on the outside, but deep pearly purple on the inside where the mollusk once lived – were as plentiful as calico scallops usually are. Racks of turtle grass clumped in piles where the Gulf pushed them ashore. We saw a family, each child with a starfish in one hand and a stick in the other. They squatted on their haunches and used the sticks to pull piles of turtle grass apart, searching for tiny treasures in the rich mats. We followed their lead and grabbed pen shells to pick through the grass. We found sea urchins, sea whips (soft corals in purple and red), Sargassum weed, seas sponges, sea pork, tiny crabs, and egg casings of whelks and conchs. And scallop,s and cockles, and hermit crabs, and some kind of lavender-gray blob that looked like a snail who had lost her shell.
Every two steps on our walk one of us would exclaim, “Look at that shell!” or “What is that thing?” Our daughter counted 41 sea urchins on our quarter mile walk, and she was too overwhelmed by the abundance of sea shells to pick many out for collection. Vibrant orange shards of calico crab shell, spotted like leopard skin, jumped out in the sea of soft pink, and so she collected several crab carapaces. The beach crawled with curious collectors and kids with fists full of shells.
A field of seashells on Anna Maria Island after Tropical Storm Andrea
Ripples and bubbles in tidal pool on Anna Maria Island
Little girl shelling under blue sky on Anna Maria Island after Tropical Storm Andrea
Blue Sky over Anna Maria Island after Tropical Storm Andrea
Blue sky over Gulf of Mexico after Tropical Storm Andrea
Lightning whelk and silver-white jingle shell on Anna Maria Island after Tropical Storm Andrea
Our shell haul. Includes calico crab carapace, skate egg case (“devil’s purse), pen shell with barnacles, cockles, whelk, jingles, scallops
I’m not sure what the beach will look like tomorrow. The waves have gone down. Whereas the landscape yesterday was painted in gray and whiteand jade green, with hardly a shell to be found because waves washed all the way up to the dunes, the scene today is one of a sunny, subtropical, Florida Gulf beach. The sky is cornflower blue, the clouds are cotton white. The Gulf is a milky jade, the land is palm green, and the beach stretches in white, tan, sea grass, and a thousand shades of shell pink. Tomorrow, the scene may be completely different. The Gulf may recapture all its treasures with the next high tide, or shore birds may devour the urchins and sea stars and crabs, or perhaps there will be a fresh crop of sea life tossed ashore. Whatever tomorrow brings, we will be there with our buckets to explore it, in all its fleeting glory.
This is my entry for the WordPress Weekly Photo Challenge: Fleeting. I apologize if the photo quality is lower than usual. I forgot my real camera, so these photos were taken with my phone. My laptop screen is also not great, so I couldn’t see the color very well when I edited. Hopefully I don’t get home and see that these are terrible.
Today is the anniversary of my first post, One Last Move, on June 7, 2012 on Butterfly Mind. In that first post, and in many subsequent ones, I wrote about trying to find my way as an at-home mom when our children both went off to elementary school, leaving me alone in quiet, not for minutes but for hours, for the first time in 9 years. I didn’t know if I should pursue a new career, and if so, what would I do? Who would I be? A young friend in Blacksburg commented on one such searching post:
“For your main line of work, I would follow whatever you naturally gravitate toward when you feel the need to be productive.”
How very wise he was. Thank you Phil. You were right. I gravitate towards words when I want to be productive, and I did not see that at the time. When I thumb through old diaries, I realize I’ve gravitated towards writing all along. Every couple of years I express in those private pages my desire to be a writer. A desire that seemed so impractical and unattainable, I never gave it credence. Until this blog. Now, I’m building a writing practice, laying a foundation so that when the kids grow up and move away, I can move forward into a writing career. If that’s still what I want to do ten years from now.
To celebrate my first anniversary, I thought I’d serve up the year’s most popular posts. For those of you who have been around since the beginning, thank you. I am grateful for your support. For those of you who are new here, welcome. Perhaps this run-down will give you an idea of where to start and what to expect on Butterfly Mind. Thanks to all of you for your readership, and enjoy.
Butterfly Mind 