Tangible Beauty...

I've had a bad day. I'm sick. Sicker than I've been in a while. When I lay down my breath sounds like a bag-pipe. A Bag-pipe? Yes, a bag-pipe, I take a breath, it whistles, I stop breathing and it keeps whistling. Snot does amazing things inside the body...and apparently it's able to slow the air down long enough to produce sound far longer than I want it to.

Anyway.

So I didn't do much today except sleep. My head hurt so bad this morning that I couldn't eat anything. I ended up taking activated charcoal to settle my stomach but still sinus headaches are no fun and my neti pot was doing little so I basically entertained myself inside my own head most of the day.

Being alone in my own head isn't so great right now. I think of my dad a lot. I think of our lives a lot. And today, I was thinking about how beautiful my childhood was and how not as beautiful my kids' childhood is.

I moved a lot as a kid. By the time we moved to California when I was 14 years old, I'd been to or though 42 of the contiguous states and had lived in Washington, Oklahoma, Washington again, Pennsylvania, Florida and then, of course, California. Today I kept thinking about Florida. I was still a really little kid in Pennsylvania...we moved the second half of third grade...and by the time I was in California I was a busy teenager. But Florida? My childhood in Florida was pretty idyllic.

See, back then, 30 ish years ago...people weren't so worried about kids getting swiped. Oh sure, it happened. The incident with Adam Walsh's son happened while we were in Florida...but it was shocking instead of commonplace. And Florida, unlike any other place that I've lived (except MAYBE Washington, but I was too young to enjoy it) was FULL of nature. I mean you couldn't get away from it.

We rented a house that was set on two lots...we had SEVEN mango trees, an avocado tree and a banana palm...never mind the palmetto bushes, the swath of ferns, the huge big Norfolk pine and the aloe vera...well and the grass that in summer could swallow you, that, at times my dad had to use a machete just so he could then go at it with the push mower.

And that is just the flora. We had fauna too...lots and LOTS of fauna. So much fauna that all of us school kids went to the Environmental Center every year to learn all about the fauna. The reality was that in some cases we were MEAT and we really needed to learn about the alligators and stingrays and snakes and spiders and such...you know...all the stuff that really COULD kill us.

There was a place that you could get down to the Indian River just two blocks from my house...a big old palm tree had been taken down by some storm or another and we'd climb up and over that tree down onto the beach and play in the alligator infested waters. We never saw one. Never saw a water moccasin either...but bites and attacks were common place even back then...so we just didn't tell my mother. Not until MUCH later.

That doesn't even COUNT the friendlier fauna. The squirrels...the raccoons that were nightly visitors to my dad's little cement coy pond. The armadillos that waddled and were run over everywhere. The manatees that really WERE in the rivers and we saw them on several occasions.

I think a lot of my sense of beauty comes from Florida. Watching the storms come across the water...Black sky butting up against the almost turquoise water...it always looked more blue with the storms coming in. Playing at the bathtub beach that was enclosed a little way out by a coral reef, that on clear days had the BEST tide pools I've seen to this day. Riding in my dad's 22 foot sail boat out from the river into the salt water and seeing dolphins jump alongside the boat. Mangrove Swamps...if you've ever canoed through one, you know what I mean...they're just beautiful...sometimes stinky, but beautiful.

Because of all this nature...we all learned a bunch of stuff accidentally. Like how to bait a fish hook. How to clean a fish...well and how to freak out mom with the heads and tails of said fish jutting out of the pavement...it was art...I thought it looked like the fish were jumping through the pavement. She wasn't NEAR as keen on it as I was.

We learned a LOT about fire ants...how to break open the nests from afar and then wait a minute and creep up and check out the tunnels and caverns from which they were scampering to remove their children.

We learned how to climb trees...and more importantly how to get down from trees, when you KNEW your brother wasn't going to get home in time to rescue you.

We learned how to DIG HOLES...big deep ones...that in time would fill in with water which taught us about something called a "water table".

My kids don't have that opportunity. We live in suburbia...where they cut down all the trees to build houses and then put up all these little ones. Our backyard is pretty good sized, but it's boring. We haven't figured out what to do with it yet...it's been 7 years...and still nothing. Everywhere around us is pretty much suburbia or city. We live in north Texas...there is no beach around here...the best I can hope for is a lake, and it's not close enough. I'm going to have to actually search it out. MEH!!

So as this was going around in my head...this crabby old, feeling sorry for myself cuz things are so much harder right now. I realized...that's not how my kids feel, they don't know what they are missing yet...and maybe they don't have to...I can do stuff to bring them tangible beauty. I can plant a garden. Take them to the lake (if I can find it), teach 'em how to fish. I can take them to the nature park. I can. I can. I can.

And what's more...it occurred to me that some of the beauty in life isn't outside. It's in our hearts and if we just keep TRYING...there's beauty there too.

Here's some of my tangible beauty today...look at the sun on her hair...breathtaking...



Sunshine, almost all the time, makes me high...

See ya around...