Over the past week on vacation in Florida, I have fallen in love again. With wind, with sea, with freedom, with language. But most importantly, with time. I have fallen in love with personal time to care for my body, to dream, to think about what’s important in life.
As a result, on this first day of the new year, as I feel the cool Gulf breeze on my bare arms, listen to it rustle the banana leaves, brush sand from my toes, and smile at the kids anteing up as they play poker with Grandma, I’ve decided that for 2017, I’m not making resolutions. I don’t have specific goals for my personal life. I’m not setting a number of books to read or a number of pounds to lose.
Instead, I resolve to feel like this:
The Gulf of MexicoFootprints on our morning walk along the GulfSailing on Sarasota Bay
On this trip, as I watched our 68 and 70-year-old sailing instructors move spryly about the 22 foot sailboat, it struck me: I want to still be able to move that easily and feel that alive when I am in my 60s and 70s (and 80s and 90s).
So if I have any objective this year, it is this: enjoy life and remain active, not for vanity, but so that my body feels good and lasts while I do all this living.
Happy 2017. May you enjoy life now and long into the future.
Morning clouds over Gulf of Mexico, Anna Maria Island, FL
I’m on the porch at a condo at the beach listening to seagulls and a construction crew’s country music station. We are on vacation. While we’re here, I’ll attempt to keep from vacating my blog altogether. I don’t know that I’ll have anything sensical to say, but maybe I can post some pretty pictures.
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.
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.
Butterfly Mind 