“Saddle up, Twitchy Baby. Let’s go for a drive.” My arms were full of warm towels from the dryer, my head full of mental furniture moving, busy work. I started to make a face at Buck, but then he dropped the other shoe. ”Let’s take a picnic lunch over to the beach.” Oh, that man. He knows me so well.
The beach is where we first took long walks together, talking through our lives and our dreams and daring to conceive an entwined future more than 30 years ago.
I dropped the towels on the bed and was ready in a flash. We made sandwiches from tender leftover Chinese 5-Spice roast pork tenderloin and brought along a plastic zip bag of organic granola with dried cranberries and almonds.
Imprints of bare feet, jogging shoes, and big birds mingled with drying seaweed and pieces of large sand dollars. We saw a young mom and dad swinging their toddlers around in the pristine air. We heard their laughter, floating bells.
I had forgotten the power of water to soften, open and cleanse.
Walking on this nearly deserted beach, the tidal pull stimulated, clarified and calmed my noisy mind.
There is an attitude of acceptance at the beach, probably because each new tide washes in with the life that, even with shed feathers and drying jellyfish, organizes itself into a tableau that becomes an artful homily.
The look of love is unmistakable. How did I get so lucky?
I am squinting into the bright sunlight. There’s a large bird feather stuck in the waistband of my jeans.
I’m sure it began with one slender vine snaking up the magnolia’s tree trunk. Maybe it had fragrant flowers or tasty berries. I’ll bet it was pretty, an encircling bracelet, a fitting adornment for the vibrant tree.
But like draws like, and slowly, so slowly no one noticed, the tree was weighted down, deformed and strangled by the insistent vines.
New shoots are the first to green up the woods. Light brown tendrils leap out at the joints to grab hold of a host. Their older bretheren thicken with age. They lie along the forest floor. They play dead, all the while sending iron ties down into the ground. They cling. They resist.
There is a visceral pleasure in cutting vines away from the magnolia. They are bouncy, boomerangs. You pull. They pull back.
I have no illusions. I know that in the dark, the vines are growing as I sleep. But each morning now, I walk to the gate and see that magnolia reaching out, breathing, growing fast in the way of those who have lost time, and I smile.
I never knew they were there. When I heard their voices for the first time last week, it reinforced my inclination toward mystery, a feeling that infinite layers, like gossamer veils, lie waiting for us to behold when a breeze lifts the corner of some new revelation. How many times have I walked the gravel road between house and gate? There are times when I thought it was boring, that near half-mile stretch of a leg, scraggly with the remains of a planted pine plantation that was planted too densely fifty years ago and left to be overrun with competing hardwoods, yaupon, magnolia and thick, Tarzan-worthy vines. And yet, even the predictable seasonal changes have a magical quality, when dead-looking sticks come alive, lush with green leaves, indigo and scarlet berries, the air exhales sweet honeysuckle, and the ever-present ants are building, always building.
I stepped onto the low dam on the northeast side of the gravel road where the spring head that makes up the wandering stream is located. Water there is contained within a rough free-form circle. Partially submerged tree limbs and branches slowly decompose in the dark water. A carpet of leaves forms a fecund liner at the bottom. We have had no winter at all this year, so I was wary of snakes as I hunkered down in my running shorts and tank top to peer over into the dark water. I wanted to take off my shoes, get in there and clean out all the dead wood, but good sense prevailed for the moment, and instead I stretched out as far as I could and removed several of the closest branches. You can see some of them stacked on the dam in the photo above. The green shoots in the foreground are Louisiana Irises that are coming up much earlier than usual this year. If the weather stays warm, soon they will be blooming purple and yellow orchid-like flowers.
Buck cut vines and thorn bushes on the southeast side of the streambed just across the narrow gravel road while I pulled limbs from the inky pool. Just as we joined back up in the middle of road, breathing hard, with twigs in our hair and scratches on our arms and legs, a loud accoustical sound filled the hollow. I thought at first it was a pack of dogs or coyotes, but my mind quickly processed the sound and decided: owls. The sound emanated from the far side of the dark pool, the spring-head. They flew, and the sound gradually grew more faint.
When we got back to the house, I went to Cornell University’s site, All About Birds, to see if I could confirm that the sound was made by owls, and which specie. As soon as I heard the audio, there was no doubt: we have Barred Owls. When I learned they like to live in hollowed-out trees or holes in old branches, I remembered a photo I had taken near the spring-head in 2004. I called it “Den and Cavity Tree,” but didn’t know what might live there.
The video below, created by youtube user srcampsite recreates the exact sounds we heard.
border:the official line that divides one area of land from another
limit: the point at which something ends or beyond which it becomes something else
I’m not crazy about the idea of sanctioning Microsoft’s “Bing” search engine as a legitimate dictionary, but that aside, when I searched for “boundary” and was served up the above entry first on the list, I knew at once that their inclusion of “limit: the point at which something ends or beyond which it becomes something else” was precisely the thought I had in mind, so I’ve picked up the stone from the road and won’t fret about its provenance.
I would love to see one of the owls, but they may be raising babies at this time of year, so I won’t be trespassing again anytime soon.
This concrete marker has been in the woods, a silent sentinel, for more than 50 years. It was put there by the now-defunct St. Regis Paper Company to mark an easement granted to the former owner of our land. That owner was a legendary legal mind, an orator in the grand style of southern lawyers, one of the last in these parts who “read” for the law rather than going to law school. He came into possession of our hundred acres and a similar-sized adjacent parcel as payment for a legal fee of roughly $300. Seems incredible now, but it was a long time ago. Incredible flows to inevitable with surprising ease.
Look closely, and in the distance you can see another be-ribboned marker. It marks a section line. Beyond it is our neighbor’s land, her horse pasture and barn. Cast your eye along that section line to imagine that just on the other side of her land is a ribbon of asphalt, the exact spot at which the current road makes a 90° curve. That is the point at which the county will straighten the road.
From the front door of our house, the old farm gate where we enter the property is roughly 1/3 of a mile, or approximately 800 of my steps. Our neighbor’s horse pasture begins at the first 90° curve of the existing road. Our gate is at the third 90° curve of the existing road.
It has been about five years since we got the first glimmer of the big changes that are in store for this area of the county in general. Surveyers have shown up from time to time. I’ve written about their visitations. Little pink flags and pick-up trucks. Public hearings have been held with bemused area residents circling large, colorfully rendered concept maps; citizens trying to get an answer to two elusive questions. How will this affect my land? When?
In the first public gatherings, a county representative sanguinely assured residents that all this tumult was on paper only, a hundred-year plan for the area. I knew better, blest or cursed as I am with the gift of finding the devil in the fine print of labryinthine online archives that are public, but sometimes placed in odd spots, and hard to find for anyone but a cold-nosed dog.
There’s an old saw about how you can’t unring a bell that’s been rung. It’s true. The knowledge that the county might abandon the current road at the first 90° degree curve and create a straightened continuation to roughly follow the section line for more than a mile and cut our property in half very close to our home was a bite from the apple that couldn’t be spit out. And it didn’t matter whether the change would come in fifty years or two, because suddenly the dreamy understanding that we are only stewards of the land became real as a concrete marker driven into the soft ground.
The concrete marker is about ten feet to the right of this picture. I don’t measure distances on the ground in terms of feet or yards. I get the sense of whether something is near or far by my own steps. Here, for instance, it is 100 steps taken by a 5’4″ woman to the front door. I take about 800 steps every day from the house straight down the asphalt drive and private gravel road to our gate. Every day, I try to imagine how life will change with an 80-foot right-of-way road right here, carrying traffic to new jobs that will come to this poor county because of the changes and helping people escape from hurricanes via this new east-west corridor.
Ah. There it is, that nugget I can’t ignore. I want it to be all one way. I want it to be just about us, what we want, about the interruption of our splendid isolation and the way the rerouting of the road reroutes our lives.
Ten days ago brought a visit from civil engineers to let us know surveyors would be on the property, this time to formulate three options for the precise placement of the road. Not in 100 years, or 50: this September.
When I leave the house walking to the gate, the spring-fed stream bed is on either side of the gravel road at about the 400 step mark. It flows from the spring-head on the east side of the road through a metal culvert under the road and gradually meanders westerly through the woods, sometimes going underground and then popping up to the surface again. Almost every day now, I spend a little time here, first hacking away the heavy vines, nature’s constrictors, to be able to get close enough to the stream bed to work, then pulling half rotted tree branches and tangled nests of roots out of the water to clear a way for the water to flow rather than merely puddle. Even a vigorous natural spring can get clotted with dead leaves and become nearly stagnant. An interventional debridement can restore the powerful circulation. I am connecting with my own source waters, nurturing the roots of personal happiness, and going with the flow.
Just because I got rid of almost all my cookbooks doesn’t mean we don’t still eat. It’s just that after 40 years of learning how to cook, I think I’ve got the basics pretty well down. Besides, all the hot and cold running foodie Apps on my various wireless devices offer recipes, stylish food photography, and articles in case I am in sudden need of diversion.
We bought a couple of pounds of jumbo Gulf shrimp a few days ago. The first night we poached the shrimp in a seasoned court-bouillon and ate them, along with some cocktail blue crab claws. Buck makes a killer dipping sauce with ketchup, horseradish, Tabasco, Worcestershire and a tad of mayonnaise. I saved half the shelled shrimp in a zip-lock bag to use for a stir-fry of onion, sweet red pepper, broccoli, garlic and mushrooms the next night. The bubbling mini-cauldron in the picture is boiling angel hair pasta. Good stuff.
It’s easy to take the town you have lived in for a long time for granted, to fantasize about how green and lush the grass must grow over the next hill. I’ve been trying lately to look at Pensacola with fresh eyes, to see things as they are rather than how they used to be years ago, or how I guess they might be. This experiment is illuminating, and I am finding that the dinky little town is quite a nice place to be.
Every year the stuffed animals that reside on bookcase shelves upstairs all year come down to spend a few days underneath what we’ve always called the Teddy Bear Christmas tree. Last week, while Buck and I were loading up the van with books to deliver around town, it occurred to me that the only one who pays any attention to the bears these days is me. Just about everyone else has grown up.
So I went back to the phones. Who in town could find a good use for some bears, a rabbit and a reindeer? The first place I called was the Loaves and Fishes Soup Kitchen. They were organized at a local restaurant back in 1983 and from the beginning their mission has been to “reach out to homeless men, women and children in an effort to meet their needs both spiritually and materially.” Loaves and Fishes serves close to 5,000 meals to the homeless each month. They have an Emergency Family Shelter (opened in May, 1991) which provides emergency shelter for up to 10 families, for up to three weeks at a time. Their website notes: “This short-term crisis relief includes private rooms, cafeteria style meals, parenting classes, life skills classes, counseling, clothing vouchers, transportation for house hunting and referrals to supporting agencies, as well as referrals to our own Transitional Housing Program. The shelter also offers over night stays for single females, depending on availability.”
Bobbie, a volunteer and self-described “traffic director,” told me they could absolutely use the stuffed animals to provide comfort and entertainment to children in families at the Shelter.
The sparkling clean, welcoming Loaves and Fishes was our first stop. Bobbie greeted us, and it was great to shake her hand.
Another drop-off was the loading dock of the West Florida Public Library, where we left off some books for the annual “Friends of the Library” sale.
Our last stop was to deliver several boxes of cookbooks I’ve been collecting for the last 40 years at Pensacola State College’s award-winning culinary arts program. A friendly staff person, Jan, met us at the loading dock with a rolling cart. I walked through the swinging double doors with her into a working industrial kitchen and was suffused in the warm, yeasty aroma of freshly baking bread. Buck and I learned that the culinary arts students prepare lunches twice a week and several dinners during each academic term. Members of the community sign up for a randomly selected lottery for a chance to attend. Jan got my email address and has already sent me all the particulars.
The house is a little lighter now, and we had great fun learning new things about Pensacola — a town we thought we knew up one side and down the other.
When a person’s hair begins to fall out, teeth loosen, nail beds become unmoored, it is not intentional. Clearing out a closet. That’s intentional. Why, then, does it feel like my sudden compulsion to shed books is more like a virus than a decision? After years of collecting them, I can’t get rid of them fast enough. They are in piles on the floor, boxes and bags, tentatively labelled Friends of the Library, West Florida Literary Federation, University of West Florida English Department.
No more writing craft books. If I can’t write my way out of a paper bag, then I’ll cut windows in the bag and get cozy. But if I can, then it will be on my own Holy Grail treasure map written on the paper bag, unglued, cut up, painted yellow and turned into a brick road leading to created worlds.
These walls of books have closed in, gotten pushy, put a pillow over my face. It took years for this fever to break. The stacks are outside my door now, and I’ve washed down the shelves, the walls, and steam-cleaned my brain.
Wild turkey gobblers eating acorns under oak tree near Pensacola, Florida. Photo taken January 11, 2012.
The acorn crop this winter has been abundant. A group of wild turkey gobblers we call the Gang of Five moves from oak tree to oak tree in a ring all around the house. There is a larger group of hens and young turkeys that comes around to graze, too, but they plan their visits to avoid the feisty boys.
I went upstairs, opened a sliding glass door and stepped out onto a second story covered deck to try to get a shot without window glass in the middle. They spotted me and began to move off toward the cover of nearby woods, but didn’t fly. More photos at The Daily Point and Shoot.
Photo from Gullible's Travels blog -- Gullible about to begin her July, 2011 hiking adventure on Alaska's Resurrection Trail
Here’s a partial list of Gullible’s travels from 2008 through 2011 (click on the highlighted links to take the trip along with her via word and photos):
Alaska via Vancouver, British Columbia on an inside passage cruise that included an on-board writer’s workshop, a photo safari in Juneau, hiking on the Chikoot Trail, and a raft tour in Skagway (May 2009)
Denali Park, Alaska, a travel trailer sojourn with Pablo, her parrot (August 2009)
An expedition to the Hawaiian island of Maui to work as a volunteer with the National Park Service in the Haleakala volcano crater (August 2009)
The Grand Canyon, a camping expedition, on foot and by mule (October 2010)
An eating, drinking, castle-hopping, walking tour in Germany (March 2011)
A solitary, 28 mile hike on the Resurrection Trail to Resurrection Pass, Alaska. Gullible began the arduous mountain journey with a 42-pound pack. (July 2011)
Gullible has tantalized readers with hints that she may go on a trip this November to Antarctica to retrace Ernest Shackleton’s voyage in the Endurance to Antarctica. She calls Alfred Lansing’s book, Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage, one of the world’s great adventure tales. My copy arrived in the mail this week and I am looking forward to reading it and following along — from my armchair –as Gullible sets sail on yet another adventure.
Photo from Gullible's Travels blog of Gullible and her buddy Pablo
Now, you might think that in-between all that travel, Gullible turns into a lady of leisure. Better toss out every single one of your pre-conceived notions of today’s 70-year-olds. Between her litter-picking volunteer obsession work, and chopping wood for the winter, she subs for the mail carrier sometimes (not as easy as it sounds on Alaska’s treacherous, albeit spectacular, roads), spends time as a house sitter for some friends at Halibut Cove, surely one of the most pristine and beautiful spots on earth, and generally chronicles life in Moose Pass, Alaska and its environs from the perspective of a person who has a fierce love and respect for the land, it’s creatures and the folks who live there.
Oh, and the idea that the “older generation” isn’t tech savvy? You can banish that out-dated chestnut, too. Gullible is an early adopter of technology. I know she has an iPad, a Kindle, a desktop, laptop, digital cameras and who knows what other high-tech gadgets. And, of course, she blogs.
Jeanne (aka Gullible) and I met in an online writing class in 2008. Gotta love serendipity.
It was a running gag. My older sister, Flo, would come in from a date to the room we shared for a time at our parents’ home.
She never turned on a light, and would say in a loud whisper, “Are you awake?”
“No.” That was my answer before I started giggling. And then we would talk for a little while. Flo protected and fought for me in ways I never knew.
Sisters: Flo (19) and Beth (9) in May, 1960
I loved Flo then, even before I knew much about love. I was awed by her glamour and warrior spirit. We still have a decade between us, but the distance has closed. We have become grown women who know how to give and receive love, who have lives filled with reality rather than mere potential, who have learned to be comfortable in our own skins. We share our creative urges in lively email exchanges between Gulf coast Florida and Arizona desert. She is an ever-blooming artist, whose latest project is a steam-punk mask crafted with nuts, bolts, washers and screws. I am eager to see it.
Flo is a beautiful woman with a generous, loving spirit and hard-won wisdom. Like me, she has been lucky in love. Her Charlie is a diamond among men.
Flo’s birthday is today; Charlie’s is tomorrow.
I’m smiling at the picture of your young selves. I say to the picture, “You were cute, then, but you are magnificent now.” Happy Birthday, Flo and Charlie.
The banner photo was taken on Moro Rock, Sequoia National Park, in 1986. A young hiker, flush with the victory of at least temporarily conquering her acrophobia, took the picture for us.
The look of love is unmistakable. How did I get so lucky?
