Little Victories

The other day I received some really good news.

While there is a bigger picture here, at the moment I can only write about it in bits and pieces. This year has been bursting with an ample amount of progress only to be followed by the kinds of setbacks that usually accompany big, big wishes.  This is the reason I accept the little victories with caution.

Matt and I have learned all too well how the good things we work so hard for come with strings attached. I guess, in a way, I have always known this, considering the weight I have carried alone for the past ten years.  And I do remember warning Matt about what I like to call “the circus coming to town” when it was determined that he and I would be pairing together for this ride called marriage. But only when you’re swimming in it, or drowning in it, and trudging through the thick of it, do you realize how tightly those strings are bound to you. In some ways and on certain days, those strings feel like a noose.

The two of us – nay, the three of us (as Elle is aware of only the bigger picture) – are so fervently ready to move on with our lives. These strings that keep me tied to one place are starting to fray, ever so slowly.  I suppose that’s a promising way to help balance the fragility of my frayed nerves, though I do believe in all the reasons why this process needs to hurry up already.

With that being said, Elle and I will be heading to Oklahoma City to be with Matt for a few weeks this summer. This adventure will ultimately become part of our bigger picture I mentioned before, and, with any luck, will help to determine how it all comes together. But for now, it is a little victory. Seeing as my first and only visit so far to the city was during Thanksgiving last year, a week blanketed in chilly rain and bitter cold wind, I am very much looking forward to getting to know Oklahoma City at her summery and sweltering best.

P.S. Waking up in the same time zone with the man I love? SUPER AWESOME BONUS POINTS!!!!!!!!!!!

The Power of Introverts

While walking the dachshund the other day, I was listening to a podcast from TEDTalks and I became quite emotional over the connection I felt to the speaker. Introverts have a unique bond with one another…and with the extroverts who are willing to take the time to understand us, work with us, and not judge us.

I am an introvert who has been called an extrovert more than once. I don’t necessarily find that to be incorrect or an insult. Quite frankly, I find that to be one of the most interesting compliments an introvert could ever be given because it means that we, the introverts, have been able to adapt to the extrovert’s world.

Listen to Susan Cain talk about our former agricultural society and then listen to how she connects the introverts of yesteryear to our modern day, one that is fueled by charisma and charm, sociabilty and gregariousness.  Our modern day is moved forward by a big business state of mind, one that encourages, no…more like pushes and forces upon us all, the group dynamic.  Notice that the introverts are more likely to be the ones left behind.

My early career in the hotel business groomed me, against everything I felt was comfortable and safe to me, to be personable and enthusiastic when dealing with strangers, friendly or otherwise. I became a salesperson, a haggler, a PR spokesperson, and, sometimes, a free therapist for hotel guests who found themselves alone, lonely, and far from home.  I learned how to be friendly and patient at my worst moments, how to see the good in people, and how to force myself to look like I really wanted to be there…in a group, at a social event, on a stage receiving an award and being applauded by strangers and coworkers. Where would I have rather been?  I would have rather been at home or upstairs in my hotel room, reading a book or watching some nerdy documentary on television.

This other piece about introverts from Susan Cain really hit home, too. It feels so good to know someone is on your side and willing to speak for you, even more so when they are one of your kind – a quiet person, a bookworm, a loner, a lover of solitude. There is nothing wrong with being an extrovert, although I do believe introverts are more often the ones who feel as though we must defend ourselves or work harder at being heard, trusted, or worthy of expectations. Susan Cain said it herself, in other words, of course, that some of us are perfectly capable of being ambiverts and that others live momentarily on the cusp of both at times, especially when life calls for it. Our tendencies steer us to be one way and, introvert or extrovert, we must adapt to the situations in which we find ourselves.  I like to think this concept of different-ness means we are all actually more alike than we may have recognized.

Adventuring: Jekyll Island (Day Two, Part One), or The Part Everyone's Been Asking About

After returning to our hotel room and having a terribly uncomfortable and almost sleepless night, we all woke up early the next morning and hurried down to the beach, intent on beating the sun which was scheduled to rise at 7:04. Watching the sun rise together had been on both of our lists for quite awhile and Jekyll Island provided the perfect opportunity to make that happen.

it's happening!

The three of us meandered along in the sand, looking out at the horizon every few minutes to catch a glimpse of the bright orange and pink rays. While we waited for the big show to start, Elle ran ahead of Matt and me and rushed us to see her newfound treasures: a dead jellyfish, whole sand dollars that had been washed ashore, shrimp exoskeletons, and whelks – some inside the shell, some outside.

Those are not his brains. Those are his "special parts" that help make baby jellyfish...just keepin' it clean here, folks.

dying whelk

For the most part, we were the only ones on the beach, save for a couple who was walking quite a distance north of us. Flip flops belonging to a stranger had been left near the boardwalk and an abandoned beach chair rested close to the dunes, turned over on its side. It was quiet and perfect. The birds began flying out to catch some fish for breakfast, flocks of them coming every few minutes. While I took photographs of the sunrise, Matt and Elle walked ahead of me. Clueless me just kept snap, snap, snapping away…

scheming...

When I caught up to the two of them, Elle took off to find some more washed-up sea animals and Matt and I congratulated each other on having come up with such a badass idea and actually dragging ourselves out of bed early enough to pull it off. Elle suddenly became really excited and begged for us to hurry, hurry, hurry to look at what she’d just found.

Must be something good!

After Matt and I reached her, I noticed she was standing next to a package of some kind of ramen noodles. Not really a fantastic beach find, if you ask me. Then Elle showed me what she had been holding in her hand, a decorative shell case with a small latch that she couldn’t get open. Matt took over and I begged him to be careful because OMG you don’t know what’s in there IT COULD BITE YOU OR STING YOU and you could LOSE A FINGER … BE CAREFUL GEEESH!!, but instead he pulled out a ring, got down on one knee, and asked me to be his wife.

HOLY FRIGGIN’ CRAP! Then I said yes.

ogle the pretty ring

I love that Matt included Elle in on his plan. Elle loves that Matt included her in on his plan! One day when things have settled and the next steps have been taken, I will be able to better describe how a sunrise on Jekyll Island was a big important moment that took nearly 20 years to make happen.

I know I said that I would break down our Jekyll Island trip one day at a time, but really – this all happened before 7:00 in the morning and, obviously, there was so much more that happened later with so much more of the day left to enjoy (canoeing, sea turtle babies, and Stargate!). However, I think it’s appropriate to just sit on this moment for now…

pelicans and a perfect sunrise

'til next time...

Keep Calm and Get Dirty

This blog post was Freshly Pressed on April 9th 2012. Yay!

There is a lot going on in my life right now. Most of which is actually inside my head because these things have yet to come to fruition. For the first time in my adult life, I’m actually excited.

I’m not really a fan of being excited. That makes me sound totally boring, doesn’t it? And, for the most part, I am boring. I prefer to keep my body’s vital organs at standard speed, and I’ll do almost anything to prevent my heart rate from increasing or my oxygen intake from surpassing how quickly my brain can actually process what the hell is going on.   I hyperventilate easily and my doctor once sent me to a class to learn how to breathe correctly.  I was genetically set up to fail at rationalizing. Life would be so much easier had my Wisconsin-bred mother just simply passed on to me her family’s biological abilities to ride in the backseats of cars without getting sick and to withstand subzero temperatures.  But nooooo…I was gifted with the anxiety attacks. Unfortunately, I get cold and queasy quite often.

I say this only because my level of excitement is pretty much matching up with my level of anxiety and, for about a good decade or so now, I have forgotten how to differentiate between the two: anxiety (ugh, dreadful) and excitement (happiness!). So while I work on these two emotions and train myself to separate one from the other, I spend a lot of time in my garden getting my hands dirty, figuring out Plans A, B, and C, and imagining how much happier I can be. The hard part is not the imagining, it’s the making it happen. Especially when I’ve become so dependent on other people’s use of time.

Apparently, I’m not really a fan of being patient, either, but that’s another story for another day.

In the meantime, while I was imagining Plan A this morning, I came to realize that my garden has become of sort of drop-off shelter for homeless plants. With our four raised beds, only two of which are mine, we should have enough cucumbers and tomatoes to supply the whole block come summertime. However, yesterday, I was asked to find room for four more cucumber plants.

Four more? Because the six we have isn’t enough? Good thing I like pickles. Add on top of this my evolving obsession with flowers, with which I seem to have plenty of success and not enough room, and the displaced seedling saga seems neverending. Surely we can take in a lemon cucumber seedling, a few squash plants, and er…there’s no room for the eggplant! Yeah, there’s also no room for four more cucumbers, a lemon cucumber, and a squash. TAKE A NUMBER AND HAVE A SEAT, EGGPLANT!

And just like any other respectable homeless shelter,  I have yet to turn a single plant away. Besides, the busier I am kept, the less likely I will be to totally lose my shit in the next coming weeks as Plan A becomes more and more of a reality…

TIME FOR PRETTY PICTURES SO I CAN THINK OF THINGS OTHER THAN MY TINGLY HANDS AND FACE DUE TO OXYGEN DEPRIVATION!!!!!!!!! (dammit, where are those notes on how to breathe…?? Gaaaaasp, I NEED AIR.)

displaced cucumbers and an out-of-work gnome

ground cherry seedlings that taught me much about patience and will soon teach me how to make a vinaigrette

celosia

verbena, my newest potted flower

my late-coming larkspur seedlings, in cahoots with the ground cherries

white alyssum

lavender

nugget imperial lantana, for the butterflies

Considering a lively Facebook discussion last week regarding the lavender, two sides were presented – how lavender has a calming effect on crazy types like myself and how lavender has been deemed a culprit in short-burst & short-term memory loss. I chose memory loss. I figure it works out for me in this way: while I am conscious and aware, I would prefer to be as calm as possible. In fact, if I wasn’t sure I’d look like a complete idiot around town, I would have strapped that lavender plant around my neck and shoulders to have it readily available to sniff in the event I feel a situation (which seems normal to most everyone else) could only mean impending doom.

Actually, there’s my Plan D: strap the lavender across my face like a horse’s feeder trough. I’M SUCH A PROBLEM SOLVER!

How Dungeons & Dragons Made Me a More Confident Writer

My boyfriend and I were talking the other night about writing. I can’t quite remember how or why the subject came up, but we had a downright good discussion on the topic. We talked about a few of the different genres and talents that are out there and how each one is able to successfully relate to the majority of people who read their certain kinds of journals and magazines.  And we also talked about how certain journals and magazines seem to crawl into this pretentious little niche by only publishing poets or authors and essayists who use such a language that one must have a degree in decoding big words to even understand it all.

I would catalogue that kind of work into a genre of its own.  And I would include Rolling Stone magazine in that genre. I like music and all, but I certainly don’t think I need to absorb a four-page spread about how ten bands I have never heard of make the writer of the article smarter than me because he has. Share your knowledge with me, but don’t preach it. You lost this reader many, many years ago.

So maybe that was the point of our discussion. The ability to relate to a reader? To reach out to an audience? I don’t quite remember, but Matt and I did get into the nitty-gritty of why writers might possibly develop their skills based on what is most important to them and their own lives. Did I lose you? I hope not, because our conversation got really good.

Matt started to explain to me that some of his favorite parts of a story, short or novel-length, are the characters. He really enjoys experiencing the evolution (or de-evolution, as is sometimes the case) of a character.  He has also admitted to me that he cannot put down a book, even if it sucks, until he knows what happens at the end. I am the exact opposite.  If a book doesn’t catch my attention or fails to hold it after so long, down it goes.  Closed up, hidden away, put back on the shelf. I need details of a situation, of the environment; I need to know what the characters in the story know. I need to feel it, smell it, hear it, see it, love it, hate it. I gotta be there.  Screw the characters, tell me what it’s like where you are!

Here’s the a-ha moment I had: While Matt was explaining to me why he is so involved with character building, he backed up for a moment and said, “Maybe it’s because I grew up playing Dungeons & Dragons and creating characters. That’s my favorite thing to do! I create the character I get to become!”

And that’s when it hit me. This whole time I have always struggled with creating characters in my stories, unable to put human characteristics into a fictional being to make them come alive, to make them real, and I have always failed. But I can spin a setting like it’s nobody’s business.  I can come up with ten different ways to say the word “happy” and I can write an impressive poem about the color yellow and I can describe a walk in the woods that actually encourages people to take their own walk in the woods because my walk in the woods sounded so damn delightful.  They want a damn delightful walk in the woods, too.

See, my whole life I have felt displaced, uprooted, and never able to settle in one spot. I think a sense of place is important. To me, a place can be a character. From an early age, we learn about similes and metaphors and, later, about anthropomorphism.  You want human characteristics? Go talk to the woods. Those trees could tell you stories that’ll make you cry. Go talk to a dining room table, the one that has been the cornerstone of family meals for generations.  She could probably tell you stories that’ll make you cry, too.  Oh, the dents, the dings, the knicks in her tabletop!  The crayon scribbles on the edges or the remnants of bubblegum on her underside! Yes, she’s got some stories.

So, the mystery is solved. I undoubtedly have always had an attachment to places, not people.  Too often people come and go, and I have come and gone, myself. But places?  They don’t usually leave and they are the memories to which I will always return.  And I think this conversation with Matt helped me to realize that I don’t need to be good at all things when it comes to writing.  I just need to be good, really good, at one thing and through the stories I build and create, I can make my one thing into everything.

Circadian Rhythm. Reinvented.

In the past few weeks, and with the help of those closest to me, I have been nudged and guided into a realization that I am only just now coming into my own. My interests are starting to become more apparent or, as sometimes is the case, they are completely different from what I originally believed them to be. Years ago (and it would probably be fair to admit this has plagued me throughout my entire adult life), I would develop a fleeting curiosity of one subject or another but too soon after I would find myself extinguishing the awareness of my new hobby with a flood of real-life tasks.

My waking moments were not my own. They belonged to my daughter. They belonged to my job. They belonged to my college classmates who needed a last-minute researcher to help major semester projects come together. They belonged to State of Florida and the family law statutes that have more control over my life than I care to ever acknowledge. All of this, of course, becomes overwhelming and exhausting and, as a result, my ambitions ran away from me in the midst of all life’s expectations and, in a final dramatic dash, there they went – collapsed into a big heaping pile. In short, I got tired. I gave up. There just was not enough…energy? time? passion? I don’t know what. All I know is that I didn’t have it. Not for a long, long while.

I think I’m finding it now, though. It – again, I’m not sure what it is, but something is in me. The free time I have fretted over for the past few months since losing my job has, in retrospect, been a good friend to me. All those hours in the day that I normally would have devoted to working full-time are mine to do with whatever I wish. Sounds a bit casual, doesn’t it? I don’t mean for it to be.

Believe me, I miss my pathetic income more than I miss my job. That isn’t to be taken out of context. I would happily work at a job I enjoy for that same unimpressive income but those don’t even exist these days. Jobs, I mean – not unimpressive incomes. From what I understand, there are plenty of those going around.

Since October, amidst my daily stresses of a dwindling savings account and the hopelessness of job hunting in Jacksonville’s crappy economy, I have managed to weave some of the more pleasurable aspects of having nothing to do (remember the old adage about idle hands?) into my day-to-day living.  Essentially, I have taken a new interest in me. How so? By having developed that aforementioned, and no longer fleeting, curiosity of food and cooking, animal care and wildlife conservation, organic gardening (purple carrots!), photography, nature, trees (oh, how I love trees), and adventuring – albeit in my own little way.

I feel like I have reinvented in myself a new kind of circadian rhythm. I like it.

In the end, the always relevant R.E.M. – Everyday is Yours to Win. They’re just the greatest band in the world, people.

Monster

Last year, I found myself faced with the frightening prospect of actually having cancer. Four months’ worth of test results came back consistently negative and I was given a six-month rest. The fact that cancer may not inhabit my body right now doesn’t even matter to me anymore. What does matter to me is that I am living with the crucial kinds of cells and scar tissue that could eventually present me with the reality of having cancer.  This is something that will never go away.

And, with that, the dread and apprehension will never go away.

My father was diagnosed with cancer years ago and has since been declared free and clear of any potential return, at least in the near future. But his particular kind of cancer was nothing I ever had to worry about, being as I am a woman.  I thought nothing more of cancer after his recovery. All of the cancer in our family has been of the self-inflicted variety, from excess smoking and alcoholism. Then last year, in the midst of my second round of tests, my mother was diagnosed with cancer.  Her particular kind of cancer is something I will always have to worry about, being as I am a woman.  She and I are no longer on the same side of the boundary line because of it. The only difference between her challenges and mine is that she has already crossed that threshold, that great divide that separates her from me – as a cancer survivor.

Me? I’m a cancer candidate. And again this year l find myself in the waiting stages. It’s only January.

This is my third round of tests in the past twelve months and my second biopsy in only six.  Not much is different in terms of my emotional handling of it all, except that now I have actually seen the mental and psychological torment that cancer can cause.  I have seen how it can turn one’s seemingly shifting yet progressing life into one of hurried and limited events. I have seen the physical recovery from day one to month two and the relief one’s body must surely feel at being rid of the monster.  I have seen the tears and shaking hands in the moments after those phone calls…the ones that replace your exhaustion from worry and anxiety with an overwhelming yet short-lived sense of elation.

I only say short-lived because…well, there’s always the next test. Sometimes they go away, the tests.  At least, I hope they do. My last test was a week ago and the results are still unknown, along with the results from my biopsy. However, my doctor suggested I schedule something in another six months if only because my medical history with him is so lopsided and inconsistent.  My doctor and I have established a good connection between us though, the kind that a woman can only wish for when she is forced to expose so much of herself in such an intimately impersonal, uncomfortable, and awkward kind of environment.

He and I, we have a goal. And it involves numbers and keeping my number count as low as possible. They’ve been creeping up and finally stabilizing, but there’s movement.  Even when I’m consciously in charge of numbers in the most hands-on and practical sense, I can barely grasp the concept or their importance in my life. This time and in this circumstance, I have to leave control of my body’s numbers to the actual inner workings of my body.  I have accepted this fact and I have also found myself bargaining with my physical insides, pleading with them and promising to take much better care of them than I have been in years past. I reminded them of why I quit smoking so many years ago and how I do my best to not swathe them in pharmaceutical chemicals or excess amounts of red meat and liquor so that they’ll have a better shot of making it to their natural expiration date.

Is that too much to ask?

No, I don’t yet know the results of my latest round of tests but it’s been on my mind a lot. Although I’m optimistic, cancer is one of those realities I cannot escape because I am constantly being reminded of the potential for such dire news each time I feel a twinge of pain where pain shouldn’t be or when I find blood where blood shouldn’t be.  I go on with my daily routines, doing my best to remind myself that nothing needs to change until it really needs to change. By that, I mean I’m doing a poor job of convincing myself that life is no different today than it was the day before I went in for more tests.

Life will never be like it was that day, ever. I just want to keep living on this side of the divide, with the candidates. Because, when you really think about it, unless you’re a survivor, that’s what we all are. Candidates.

Seafood Market

On New Year’s Eve, Matt and I had to prepare for my family’s annual NYE seafood feast. We drove out to the village of Mayport to check out a fresh seafood market called Safe Harbor Seafood where we planned on buying a few pounds of crab and another pound or two of local shrimp (the Mayport/Fernandina Beach area of Florida is where one will find the best shrimp in North Florida). There was mention of a restaurant inside the market and since we would be arriving around lunchtime, it seemed just as good a place as any to grab a quick bite to eat and carry on with our seafood shopping errands for the day.

As soon as Matt and I saw the restaurant menu, we were impressed and immediately began strategizing over who would order what dish, what dishes we could split between the two of us, and whether it was such a good idea to eat a seafood lunch mere hours before we were to sit down with my family and gorge on pounds of this stuff all over again.  Each time we changed our orders and began salivating over a new item it became clear to us both that we would be stupid to not do it.  I mean, our only major problem was that we’d have to eat two full meals containing fresh shrimp and crab in the same day?

Do you really feel sorry for me?  I didn’t think so.

Matt ordered a shrimp taco, a fish taco, and two shrimp tempuras. I chose a shrimp taco and a spinach cake. Then we went outside on the deck to enjoy the view of the St. Johns River and all the shrimping and fishing boats docked outside.  These are the shrimpers and fishermen whose hauls from that morning were feeding us that afternoon.  This is what it’s like to eat fresh, fresh, fresh seafood.

As you can see from the photographs below, we didn’t dine alone.  The pelicans behaved like a very polite bunch of domesticated neighborhood ducks, mostly civil and slow to anger but eager to be fed the scraps from the fish cleaning station. I couldn’t have been more than a few feet from some of them and only once did one ruffle its feathers at me and announce that it wasn’t comfortable with me getting any closer. Since I’ve had a few run-ins with nasty pelicans in the past, I have nothing but respect for this particular gang of plunge divers. Compared to the angry, bitey pelicans in Cedar Key on Florida’s Gulf Coast, the Mayport pelicans were an absolute pleasure to be around.

We finished our lunch and Matt, who has traveled up and down both the east and west coasts, declared, “Now THAT is the best fish taco I’ve ever eaten!”. He and I walked back inside to check out the market’s selection of fresh seafood.  The prices were quite reasonable and the place was packed, which is always a good sign.  I’ve only eaten snow crab and king crab so I was a little hesitant to approve buying a few pounds of stone crab, but if we wanted to eat that night, we had no choice.   An additional two pounds of shrimp later, with heads-off, of course, because I don’t know how to prepare shrimp – I just eat it – we strolled out of the market with the most important ingredients for our New Year’s Eve feast safely contained inside an ice-packed travel cooler.

New Year’s Eve is pretty much the only time of the year we all sit down at the table together and get our hands dirty – peeling the shells from local Mayport shrimp seasoned with Old Bay and cracking open the meat-filled legs of a succulent crab. The crab is usually the star of the meal, giving bragging rights to whoever pulls the largest chunk of meat from a claw. There is usually a mess when all is said and done – pieces of shrimps legs falling halfway from a plate, spilled dipping cups once filled with melted butter, cocktail sauce on someone’s brand new shirt. We don’t even use napkins during this meal as only a thick, dampened washcloth will suffice.

NOTE: This year, more wine than usual was consumed – by the cook and by the recipients of the meal – giving the chef (aka my Mom) a slight delay in reacting to an unfortunate stovetop pot of burning crab.  The smoke in the house was so thick that Matt, Elle, and I decided to finish our wine outside on the back porch (like we really needed more wine, and no – Elle did not have wine). The stench from our house even kept Crazy Rex indoors.  All in all – BEST NEW YEAR’S EVE EVER.  And my favorite part?  I got to kiss Matt at midnight.  Happy 2012, peeps.

A Good Place

After our nearly 7-hour drive back to Jacksonville from Orangeburg, South Carolina, we had only a few hours to rest and recharge before heading back on the road – this time south…to the beach! The next two days were spent relaxing in a quiet town called Crescent Beach.

Here are some scenes from our two-day vacation:

Our condo was on the fourth floor which allowed for some breathtaking views but provided enough flights of stairs to take yet even more of our breath away.  Later we learned that our building’s elevator was forced to shut down because of the day’s powerful wind gusts (we experienced a bit of this while at the top of the St. Augustine Lighthouse, but that day trip to visit the city’s sites is for another post…). Occasionally, Matt and I were able to tear the kiddo away from her new Samsung Galaxy tablet long enough to stare at the massive fishing ships on the horizon or watch a dozen or so pelicans skim the water for food. Elle even got Matt to try bodyboarding in the very chilly ocean temperatures. Their reward was the heated outdoor pool.

We ate at the local restaurants – no chains eateries for us, at least this time around – and found ourselves some new flips flops, board shorts, and a hooded sweatshirt at a surf shop MEGASTORE.  Seriously, the place was huge. I even convinced Matt to spend an hour of his life watching the newest episode of Teen Mom 2 on Tuesday night.  Wine was provided, mostly as a tool of persuasion, but it obviously worked.

The three of us acted like tourists but with enough “local” experience to know how to get around town.  Already being familiar with the scenic highways and the short cuts around the beaches certainly made it easier for us, but the best part was relaxing every night with the sound of the surf just outside our sliding glass door.  The constant rumble of the crashing waves frequently made its way into our space.  When that kind of roar is so powerful and overwhelming, yet comforting and calming, you know you’re in a good place.

A Walk in the Woods

 When I was a kid, I was usually out playing in the woods.  No matter the season, no matter the day. Most times, I was with my friends. We’d climb trees year-round, sled down steep and winding hills in the winter, collect giant leaves in the fall, pick blueberries in the summer, and explore the paths out to the fields where the red clay dirt would stick to the bottoms of our shoes and make us leave dirty prints on the carpet inside the house, giving away to our parents that we’d gone too far from home. Sometimes, I would take my dog with me. Other times, I’d walk the trails alone.

I enjoyed being alone, even as a child. The woods were just across from my house and led to the middle of nowhere or to the street right next to ours…depending on where I wanted to go. I’d have a paperback book with me, usually a Judy Blume or a Sweet Valley High, and a spot in mind where I would sit beside a tree and read. I was a serious kid who thought too hard about serious things. Sadly, that never changed as I grew into an adult. So with nothing to disturb me but the sound of the wind in the tree tops, birds overhead, or the scampering of squirrels’ feet across the forest floor, I would finally succumb to the silence all around me that I felt my 12-year old self so desperately needed. 

 

Today was one of those days when I needed to be in the woods.  I decided to visit the Timucuan Ecological Preserve and Fort Caroline National Park since the weather would be near-perfect. I’m usually so engrossed in the history of a national landmark, but today led me to the nature trails on the Preserve. The struggles of the French, the British, the Spanish, and the Timucuan Indians just couldn’t hold my interest today.  What I craved was the smell of moss, dirt, the earth beneath felled trees. My body, powered by muscles usually aching from the daily stress of worry and anxiety, wanted to walk. And walk. And walk some more.

So walk I did.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 I spent nearly two hours out there, just walking the grounds and looking for Cinnamon Ferns and inhaling the air.  It was nice. There were very few people around. Oh, sure. I could hear them, but just barely, and I didn’t see them. They were doing their thing and I was doing mine. And the sounds of the woods kept the other people’s voices from getting too close to me. 

And that’s really what I needed – to have all the voices, including my own, turned down.

(Photos: 1 – American Beech & Loblolly Pines. 2 – Yaupon Holly (tree & berries).
3 – Live Oak trees covered in Spanish moss. 4 – groundcover of clovers. 5 – canopy of Live Oak trees. 6 – Florida Beauty Berries. 7 – Resurrection Ferns. 8 – just an adorable little mushroom.)