Around Here

The three-hundred mile wide oscillating sprinkler that was tropical storm Fay left mushroom tracks on local lawns. Most of these are probably edible macrolepiota americana, but maybe not. We used to gather wild mushrooms as youngsters, relying on the unreliable folklore that the good ones had gills of tan to brown. The lighter the underbelly, the more dangerous the mushroom, all the way out to the chalk white D estroying Angel which, it was said, allowed victims who had ingested one to delightfully recover from acute gastrointestinal agony just before killing them. But we knew slippery jack, and knew in exactly which pineywood understory the yummy fungi could be found. They found their way into many a stir fry, spaghetti sauce, or omelet. I brought my German boyfriend, a professional chef, with me on a Michigan outing one October. My old friend Walter, at whose house we were staying, suggested we gather some slippery jack for a roast. Off we went, and there they were: little drifte...

Just toss it up in the air... I'll grab it as it goes by. Bolixing forecasters, Fay chasse’d east at Cape Romano and rumba’d around us before crossing northeast, trailing rainshowers all the way. Thanks for the good wishes, my friends. There was so little clean up, that undoing our preparations took longer. We got dampened and blow dried, and not a lot more. I have no idea how many hurricanes I’ve lived through or watched unfold on television. The first was hurricane Andrew, the second most destructive storm in U.S. history. It decimated Homestead , south of Miami , a year after I moved to Florida . The weather is actually very predictable here, and normally uneventful … except when there’s a hurricane. We lie, daydreaming, twixt tiger's paws. I stood in an eye once. On Staten Island , when tropical storm Chris swept up the east coast back in 1988. My friend Pat and I went up to the roof and there it was, like one of DeMille’s biblical miracles, a solid wall of dark, dark ...

Heineken, check Potato chips, check iPod charged, check See you on the other side.

We'd wash the car in our swim trunks, splashed by sudsy buckets, sprayed by shimmering arcs squirted from green hoses. Water choked with nozzles made rainbow-haunted mists in the sun. Then, dry clothed and ravenous, we'd pile into the car and drive to the drive-in where we'd order iced root beer and maybe a "long hot dog foot" as my cousin once excitedly barked into the speaker. There is something essentially primitive, and primitively appealing, about this fire-driven vehicle, its modern shell and bearing notwithstanding. Under its hood is a crude and ancient force, refined, compressed, whose sources and smoke and domestication predate our stories. But now we return Prometheus' fire to brother sun and our derricks, now bladed and sleek, unto sister wind, who we have learned can light and sail us home all by themselves. Perhaps our earthbound flame will grow sacramental, relegated ceremonially to our candles, Olympic cauldrons, fireworks, flambe's, and the...

I was drawn, first, to the light and composition. Then by how these two fragments of the natural world, the palm tree in its allee, the trees reflected in the box office glass, are sequestered in their fabricated contexts, one concretely, the other metaphorically.

I see them, these feral carts, on my ride. The old ones huddled in the same old places. I see new ones in places where I've not seen one before. Cart vans sweep through the neighborhood, rounding up runaways. They always come back. I've watched them watching cars. A few can never be tamed.

The city of Cape Coral is laced with over 400 miles of canals. I thought I'd get in a boat one day and explore them all. Meanwhile, some passing glimpses...

Terry wasn't a popular name among my classmates, or among my adult friends. The only Terry I remember was the one I worked a summer job with, I'm guessing we were seventeen, at a department store. Blondish, built, waspy, wound up, he radiated such verility that one suspects he could have impregnated girls by simply facing in their general direction. He was aware of this and had an aura of laughing at life. Everybody liked him. Who's your Terry?