Around Here

I arrived in Sarasota Monday afternoon. Aunt Helen's service was Tuesday morning some 90 miles north of there. After brunch with my cousins and assorted kinfolk that morning, I returned to spend the rest of the day and another night at The Cypress, nothing on my agenda. Here's a slide show with some shots of the Inn, and a few random glimpses around town. Nina, Vicki, and Robert were friends in New Jersey who packed it in a decade ago and headed south, determined to start a bed and breakfast under tropical skies. They had a vision. The Cypress was what they envisioned. They eventually found, and bought the old house. In due course their investment of toil, sweat, and greenbacks produced the timeless kind of old Florida retreat you've always imagined. At every turn there's some lovely, welcoming detail. A view of Sarasota Bay, dotted with sailboats, shimmers from the front porch. Breakfast, the day I left, was fresh fruit, morning-made blueberry-peach muffins, and the k...

I'm in Sarasota tonight, at Vicki, Robert, and Nina's wonderful B&B. I drove up to attend my aunt Helen's memorial service; she died a few days ago at 87. She was a dear old thing, and passed on surrounded by her family and their love. I'm fond of Sarasota too, and will be joining Birdie up here next Sunday for the big Sunday drum thing at Siesta Key. Birdie can describe it better than I can. I return to the Cape tomorrow. I'll catch up with everybody in a couple days...

One of my favorite of all tropical trees is this, often called a sago palm, but wrongly: it isn't a palm at all. It's something more ancient... a cycad. Cycads date back at least 200 million years, one of the oldest of seed-bearing plants, probably originating in the early mesozoic era. It has left fossils on every continent of the planet. The stem along the interior of its frond is laced with huge needle-sharp spines, thought to deter ravening dinosaurs. A beautiful one, just two stories high, though more than thirty years old, grew just outside the lanai off my bedroom some years ago. Its gorgeous head, fifteen feet across, spanned the entire breadth of the lanai, plunging the west end of my home into tropical splendor. It was killed in a thunderstorm a few years ago... I suspect by one of the small tornadoes that often accompany, like lethal courtiers, tropical storms in this part of the world. I awoke that morning to a flood of oddly unfamiliar light pouring into my bedroom...

I The pianist walked to center stage and sat down at the spotlighted grand. The applause receded like dry leaves gathered away in a gust. In the breathless silence the pianist began playing a nocturne. At intermission he saw him, leaning against the shadowed wall, steeped in the program... His name was David. “This isn’t like me,” he said. David smiled. “Who is it like?” II He sprawled on the couch, sated, serenaded, adrift. David sat, bespectacled, in a t-shirt, at the piano, playing Chopin. This, then, was the moon. A summation of things loved, and him, breathing, a summer night. “This one is called ‘the cat,” David said. “Hear it? The little cat feet?” I should have been a pair of velvet paws, he thought, scuttling across pliant keys. III He sat parked in the driveway between the bundled palm fronds, brown and crisp, piled at the curb, and a grackle on a fence. Just ahead was David’s car. And beyond that, somewhere in the house, David. He imagined him shouldering a phone, sippin...

I bookmark my bathroom reading with my reading glasses.  The bridge points to the exact paragraph where I left off...