A Vase in Spring

Home Sweet Home! I got back yesterday about 11 a.m. and although my flight was fine, with no major discomforts (and significantly less alcohol than last time), I am so relieved my traveling is over for the foreseeable future. We've decided to spend Spring Break here in London, so my feet will be on the ground for a while.

I didn't sleep on the flight at all. Sometimes I can but this time, no. So my mission yesterday was to keep myself as busy as possible in order to stay awake. I did laundry, I vacuumed, I cleaned the bathrooms, I took care of some minor stuff in the garden. If I tried to read or do anything on the computer my eyelids would sag like bargain-basement window blinds. Finally I went to bed at about 9 p.m. and slept soundly all night. Hopefully I'm more or less back on London time now, since I wasn't away for long.

It's funny that I spent all of yesterday cleaning, because that's also what I did in Florida the day before. Everyone else had gone home so I cleaned up our guesthouse and did all the laundry before getting on the plane.

That's the state of the garden, above. It will be time to mow the lawn soon! The wildlife cam is back in place so we'll be able to reacquaint ourselves with the local foxes.

The forsythia has burst into bloom...

...and indoors, the Rhipsalis or bird's-foot cactus has more flowers than ever before, I believe.

This is the one item (aside from some loose pictures and my dad's Europe slides) that I took from their house. It sat on some shelves above their TV for years. I believe my dad got it when he lived in the La Place Apartments in Tampa right after his divorce from my mom and before he married June. I seem to remember it came from an art show. It's quite heavy, and signed and dated 1974. I can't quite make out the signature but I'll give it a closer look one of these days.

I've always believed this vase to be black, but it's clearly blue. It was in such a dark location in their house that I've never perceived the color correctly!

Florida Critters

Here it is -- the moment you've all been waiting for. (Not really, I know.) I downloaded the data from the wildlife cam yesterday morning and found a few interesting clips. I captured a pretty big raccoon sauntering across the back yard at my stepmother's guesthouse, another raccoon snuffling the camera and trying to figure out how to take it off the tree (!) and finally, an armadillo nosing around a rotted part of our dock, where there are probably plenty of bugs. For just four nights' recording, and not knowing where I was likely to encounter animals, I was pretty happy with that glimpse of nocturnal Florida!

I am programming this to post automatically, because I'm not landing until 9 a.m. Tuesday. I'll fill you in on my journey on Wednesday, if there are any stories to tell!

Bombax and Road Rage

I came across this jungly scene while driving through Bradenton yesterday with my brother. Doesn't it look like something from "Tarzan," or maybe one of those "Road" movies from the '40s -- "Road to Zanzibar" or "Road to Bali"? That tree with the red blossoms is what grabbed my attention. It's a kapok, more appropriately called a Bombax, and it has huge, rubbery, prehistoric-looking flowers that fall in profusion at this time of year.

I was happy to see one blooming.

We also passed this magnificent pink Tabebuia, a relative of the yellow one I posted a couple of days ago. (My brother took this photo at my request, and I can hear him now: "STOP TALKING ABOUT PLANTS!")

Yesterday was the day to go visit Dave's family. My brother and I got into his low-slung shiny blue Subaru -- it's so low that it makes me groan when I get in and out of it -- and drove down to Bradenton over the Sunshine Skyway bridge. We met up with Dave's sister Dawn at the family mobile home in Cortez, and then took his parents to lunch at the Anna Maria Oyster Bar. (Or actually, they took us, since his dad paid as usual.) I had fish tacos with mango, which were delicious, and we said hi to Pearl, the robot waitress, who has lost her coconut bra since the last time I saw her.

We all video-chatted with Dave in London via Facebook, and then my brother and I headed back to Tampa. My brother has loved cars since he was a tiny kid, and he loves to drive and spends a lot of time on the road, and he has lots of opinions about the proper ways to drive. Those opinions emerge in his hilarious habit of psycho-analyzing all the drivers around us. Most of us see someone driving crazy and say, "Wow, that guy is a jerk." My brother sees them and says, "That guy is a frustrated slave to the manosphere who's boiling with rage and fears he's an incel." He will judge someone's character based on whether their truck has racing stripes from Amazon or a certain style of hubcap. About 35 years ago I sold him my own car, a Honda, and he still holds it against me that I had spilled coffee on the center console and it had sticky spots. To hear him tell it, I replicated a Jackson Pollock painting inside that car.

He has an eagle eye for any kind of highway oddity. He spotted one pickup truck with a sagging back end that looked so scary and unworthy of the road that I couldn't believe it was legal to drive. Once he pointed it out I was astonished, but I know if I'd been in the car by myself I'd have breezed past without a glance.

Today I'll be helping my stepsister and her husband tidy up the house after all their hosting this weekend, and then I'm off to the airport in the afternoon for the journey back to London. I'll let you know tomorrow whether the wildlife cam picked up anything interesting in my stepmother's yard. (I'm sure you can't wait!)

Lakes Are Holy Places

This frog (lizard?) greets people who enter the bathroom of the pizza shop I visited with my family on Friday. It was a little surprising to open the door and find that face staring back.

It's really not a very appropriate picture to start this post, but it's literally the only one I have. I took almost no bloggable photos yesterday, which was crammed with people people people and lots of family time. In fact I didn't even take pictures of the family, which now that I think about it was probably an omission. I was paying too much attention to "peopling," to use a term I learned from Bug.

The memorial service went well. We had some of June's favorite music playing softly in the background as everyone gathered, like Joan Baez, Judy Collins and Joni Mitchell. Then whoever wanted to speak got up and did so, and I did indeed deliver my remarks, though I don't know how effective they were. I have a tendency to over-intellectualize everything (not that I am very intellectual) and let's put it this way -- although they choked me up, I'm not sure they affected anyone else the same way. My brother and stepbrother both spoke, as well as two of June's sisters and my nephew. He delivered the best line of the day when, as the last speaker, he said, "I guess there's nothing to do now but pour her in the lake with Pawpaw."

And that was indeed the plan. My stepmother had been cremated, as had my dad after he died back in 2016. June had saved Dad's ashes, so in the evening we took both his cremains and hers down to the lake and poured them together, in a single mingled stream, into the water. They spread in a fantastic chrysanthemum cloud, almost like a firework, before dissipating in the water. I can't think of a better place for them -- they loved sitting down at the lake and sharing an evening cocktail, and spent a lot of time fishing there and gazing out at the water.

Just like when my brother and I scattered my mom's ashes in the lake where we grew up (a different body of water), I took a photo afterwards. To me, these images always seem so full of God, whatever we conceive him/her/it to be. Any lake in Florida is automatically a holy place of sorts, as far as I'm concerned.

In between the service and the ashes, we chatted with June's six siblings and their spouses, along with other family members and friends. Basically I spent the whole afternoon mingling, which really took it out of me. I think I hold my own pretty well in any social situation, but after a while it's just so tiring -- especially when the people involved are not people I know well. I met June's brothers and sisters several times in my life and many of them had very good things to say about her marriage to my dad and her relationship with all of us kids, so it was rewarding in that sense, but it was also exhausting.

Last night, the family stayed up talking (quite loudly!) into the night but I retreated to my room and went to bed. Of course I'm on a different timetable from everybody else, so that's part of my fatigue too.

Today I'm off to Bradenton to see Dave's sister and parents, and I'm still a little unsure how the rest of this trip is going to play out. I'm not sure if I'm staying down there or coming back to Tampa tonight, for example. I fly back to London tomorrow night, but the real business here is pretty much over and my stepbrother has already departed, along with all the siblings. I'd anticipated needing to sign documents or do business stuff but I don't think any of that is ready yet.

It's decompression time, I guess.

Tabebuia and Pinky

It's not quite 6 a.m. in Florida and I'm back at Dunkin' Donuts, because although my stepsister and her husband have a coffee machine, they had no coffee that I could find -- so I decided to just take a walk up the highway. Nobody else will be up for hours so I imagine I will not be missed!

February and March are great times to visit Florida, because many of the trees are blooming -- the red kapok, the purple jacaranda and the yellow Tabebuia, above. I haven't seen the first two yet, and in fact I'm seeing a lot of frost-scorched plants from a freeze that struck this area several weeks ago. Fortunately the Tabebuias weren't set back by the cold.

I took a walk around the neighborhood yesterday morning and was struck by how many birds I was hearing. It was a chorus! I made a recording:

Steve Reed · Florida Birds

According to my Merlin bird app, here's what you're hearing in just that one-minute clip:

Pretty amazing, right?! This really is an incredible, diverse jungle of a state. I have no idea why the Parula warbler is my "bird of the day," whatever that is. Speaking of which, I haven't checked the wildlife cam yet, so I don't know whether I'm capturing video of any critters. I'll download everything right before I leave and post whatever video results when I'm back in London on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, here's a video of another exotic (to me now, anyway) creature, a limpkin. Doesn't it sound positively prehistoric?

I spent yesterday morning running some errands with my stepbrother and his wife, including going to Target, where I was amused to see this:

It's kind of surreal to be on the other side of the planet and stumble across a picture of a crosswalk that's right around the corner from the school where I work!

Soon afterwards, my stepbrother's son, daughter and her husband and kids woke up after an all-night drive from Louisiana, and nine of us went to Alfonso's, a pizza restaurant that has existed since we were kids and still operates out of the same storefront near our house. I think the staff were a little horrified to see our loud gang (including three preschoolers) come through the door but they handled everything well, and it was good to sit and catch up with people I haven't seen for at least a decade (or in the case of my niece's husband and kids, never). It struck me that as much as memorials are about the people who died, they're also an opportunity for a reunion of sorts, a convergence of family members who are normally flung across the face of the planet. People say funerals are really for the living, and I guess that's true.

My brother arrived in the afternoon and we went to Starbucks and caught up there.

The actual memorial is today, and I've prepared some remarks along the lines of my blog post from a month ago. We'll see if I get brave and actually deliver them.

Last night we all gathered for another loud meal, and brave Pinky watched all the activity mostly from the couch, where she snuggled up against me. (I was sitting where my stepmother normally would.) Pinky was very happy to get a few tiny nibbles of pizza. Her little tail was wagging like crazy.

Who ever imagined that Pinky would wind up being the survivor of her whole household, outliving not only her chihuahua companion Manny but also my dad and stepmother? (My stepsister's son, who lives in my stepmother's house, is caring for her now.)

I'm Here

That's my plane, above, sitting on the tarmac at Tampa International Airport after we landed yesterday. Is that a Florida sky or what? Coming down through it wasn't hard at all -- it looks much stormier than it actually was. In fact my whole flight was mercifully easy.

It started in an annoying fashion when I got to the Thameslink train platform in West Hampstead just in time to see the 8:09 a.m. train pull away. I actually hit the button to open the doors before it began moving, but I was too late. It left anyway. I had to cool my heels on the platform for half an hour waiting for the next train.

But I left plenty of extra time so I wasn't stressed, and checking in and going through security at Gatwick was a breeze. I guess this is the first time in recent memory that I've taken a mid-week flight not somehow attached to a school holiday period, because there were no queues at all. As I told Dave, "I'm going to always fly on a random Thursday from now on!"

The flight wasn't full either, so I had an empty seat beside me and the flight attendant was the biggest enabler in the world when it came to serving alcohol. I asked for a gin & tonic and she said, "Would you like two?" Not one to refuse such a generous offer, I accepted, and then when I got wine with my meal she said, "Would you like two?" And then brought me a third later.

So I was fairly blotto for much of the flight, but if there's one safe place to get tipsy it's in an airplane, where you have no control over anything anyway. I watched two favorite Florida movies that I happened to have downloaded onto my computer, "Condominium" and "A Flash of Green," both adapted from John D. MacDonald novels. It struck me that "Condominium" captures a sort of class resentment that is particularly relevant in our Trumpian era -- a blue-collar disdain for the wealthy and educated. (I actually opened my TextEdit app and made a note about this so I could remember to mention it on the blog, a sure sign that I was buzzed: "Captures the experience of the blue collar male — resentment toward wealthy people. Insulation of the wealthy — decamp to Switzerland!" As you may remember from college, everything seems deep and insightful when you've been drinking.)

Anyway, if there's anything better than watching a favorite old movie accompanied by wine, I'm not sure what it is.

When I landed in Tampa I said hello to Phoebe, our airport mascot, as I always do.

My stepsister, stepbrother and brother-in-law all met me at the airport, and I'm now staying at my stepsister's cat-themed house. (They have two cats and lots of cat-related paraphernalia. Thank goodness Dave's not staying here, because he's allergic to cats and he'd be having fits -- although everything is very clean and not "catty" at all, if you know what I mean.)

I did bring my wildlife cam. I'm not sure how successful I'm going to be in capturing some interesting Florida critters, because my stepmother's property is surrounded and divided by several fences, but I'm going to try. After all, the walls of our garden in London do nothing to keep out the foxes!

Unicorn Magic and the Two-Minute Garden

Here's my find from yesterday's walk home from work -- someone's unicorn charm. I left it on the sidewalk hoping whoever dropped it will retrace their steps to find it again. Maybe the magic of the unicorn will help guide the owner back.

I am about to take off for Florida. I'm pretty much packed and I will be in the air in a matter of hours, insha'allah.

I took down the wildlife cam, intending to bring it with me to Florida. I've always wanted to get some video of whatever's happening in my stepmother's yard at night. I'm imagining the place is rife with possums, raccoons, armadillos and maybe even an alligator or two. But I'm not sure I'm going to bring it. There will be a ton of people around this weekend and it's probably not the best time to try to get wildlife footage. We'll see.

Meanwhile, here's what came off the camera from the beginning of this week:

There's not that much exciting, to be honest. First, Pale Cat making his or her rounds, passing one way and then four minutes later passing another, just at the time when the light dimmed enough to make the camera switch from color to black-and-white. Then there's some random fox footage, and then I take the camera off its mount so I can use the terra cotta planter it was sitting on for the rescued primulas.

At 1:07, a fox runs by with something in its mouth and buries it in one of the hydrangea pots. Probably one of those dog treats someone gives them. (Not me, I swear!)

Then there's more fox back-and-forth, followed at 1:38 by two nearly identical "Loch Ness Monster" style videos of Tabby passing by, once at 4:30 a.m. and again after 7 p.m. That cat is out at all hours. Finally the fox comes sniffing around once more, maybe looking for its buried treat?

I haven't seen the fox with the bare tail tip in a while. But maybe its tail fur has grown back?