I’d like to thank this ladybug for eating all the aphids off my grapevine. 🐞
Playing tourist in my own town. I figured it was kind of a Ft. Lauderdale rite of passage, and I’d never taken my daughter. The first time I went on this I was six. When I was a teenager, my aunt worked on this boat and she’d bring me to work with her, so I spent many summer nights in my teens riding up and down the Intracoastal. The captain let me steer it a few times and my favorite job was on the late night rides he’d let me call the bridge tender.
Look at this lovely shell ginger flower I found.
I couldn’t miss the EPCOT garden festival. 🌸🌿🌸
Here is a picture of me in my professor costume. Today I got to visit Prof. Hagood’s Florida Writers class at FAU and run my mouth for almost two hours to his students all about writing and IT WAS WONDERFUL!!! Teaching and talking about writing and telling stories brings joy to my heart. 📚 📖❤️
New delphiniums for the yard. I love how ridiculously blue they are.
People ask me all the time what’s the secret to becoming a real writer, so I decided to take an instructional photograph. Here is your step by step visual aid. The secret to being a writer is “Bottom in Chair.” Repeat.
Here is my #caturday contribution. Miss Grey yawned when I was making her portrait. I love this strange, neurotic kitty so much.
Last night I went kite flying again. Sometimes I feel badly about myself - like the things I enjoy aren’t what’s cool. I’m not athletic, and I hate going out drinking and dancing more than anything. I like gardening and poetry and baking and flying kites at sunset. I like cats and afternoon tea and lying on the floor having a good conversation. I feel sometimes like people think I’m weird or not a “fun girl.” But last night everyone on the beach stopped to look at this beautiful kite and people started clapping for it, and some old French people came up and started talking to me so I got to speak a little French with them because my kite is a lovely papillon and it made them very happy to see it. And getting to spread a tiny bit of beauty and joy like that I think is worth being a little strange. I think I’d rather be this way. I think we should embrace our quirks and unusual passions. I think we should follow what makes us feel good instead of what we suppose makes others feel better about us or more comfortable around us.
The passionflower vine in my yard bloomed today, so how about my very most favorite passionate poem in its honor for #nationalpoetrymonth ? This is “lady i will touch you with my mind” by the great e.e. cummings. lady, i will touch you with my mind. touch you and touch and touch until you give me suddenly a smile, shyly obscene (lady i will touch you with my mind.) Touch you,that is all, lightly and you utterly will become with infinite care the poem which i do not write.
April is #nationalpoetrymonth which is like a birthday for English teachers. So let me give you this gift. “Song”by Brigit Pegeen Kelly is the greatest poem I have ever read. Nothing comes close and this is just an excerpt. Google it so you may read the entirety of its brilliance. The first time I read this poem I began to cry. Then I started to sob. And then I went into full on hysterics. I cried for everything I have ever lost and everything I would ever love. I could not stop with this outpouring of grief. I was in school and had to leave class and everyone thought I was a crazy person but still I kept on crying. I could not stop crying. I cried the whole way home. Now tell me. What has ever moved you so much? How can language do something like that? I have always wanted to believe in magic. As an adult, magic can be very hard to find, but in poetry it is very much alive. There is a magic in how we can put together words and connect souls and experiences and love and suffering and beauty and pain. That’s why I majored in poetry. Nothing else has ever done that to my cold, closed heart.
Butterfly love. Maybe I should’ve given them some privacy.
Even the swamp was bright and pretty this morning.
I saw a peacock and he agreed to pose for me instead of pecking me to death, and then it reminded me of a poem. “What's riches to him That has made a great peacock With the pride of his eye? The wind-beaten, stone-grey, And desolate Three Rock Would nourish his whim. Live he or die Amid wet rocks and heather, His ghost will be gay Adding feather to feather For the pride of his eye.” #yeats
Shamrocks in my yard. Taken with ShakeItPhoto. 🇮🇪 ☘️ Happy St. Patrick’s Day! ☘️ 🇮🇪
After yoga beach walk is always a good idea. 🌊
A lot of people don’t know that I really like baseball. I was kind of raised on it. My grandfather was a big Orioles fan when I was little. I love it because it’s so calm and quiet, but also because I’m incredibly sentimental and nostalgic, and baseball is a part of a beautiful, though idealized, sort of American mythology - the sort of past you long for, although it never existed. It’s important to remind myself of that. I have a relative who is one of the greatest players of all time, from back in the day, and he is African/Latinx and when he first started out, he wasn’t even allowed in the same hotels as the white players. You should hear his stories. They kind of haunt me. But today is a beautiful spring day in Florida and we’re feeling very happy and lucky to be at this game. Twins are playing the Pirates. Twins winning so far. Bottom of the fourth and I haven’t had my peanuts yet. ⚾️❤️
On the West Coast of Florida there’s a historic site that was once the compound of a cult that believed the earth was inside of a spherical shell, and that the stars and moon were designs on its inner wall. So of course I had to go see this place. 🌏

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