Friday, September 20, 2013

Land Of Flowers


We all know how much I love Florida. Not the Mickey Mouse Florida. Not the Meth-Guy-Eats-The-Homeless-Guy's-Face Florida. Not the Rick Scott version of Florida which seems to be a haven for the richest and most powerful and a fuck-you to everyone else, Florida. But the Florida of the streams and rivers and lakes and woods and sky and critters and wild beauty and history. I belong to a group on Facebook called Old Florida and today they posted a link to an article about the decline of North Florida's lakes. Lo and behold, they quote Lis Williamson on it and have embedded a song she wrote called Land of Flowers. 
If you don't do anything else all day, please go to the article and even if you don't read it- I mean- what do North Florida lakes have to do with your life? probably not much- and scroll down to find the embed of Lis's song. It's a beautiful song, sung by an angel.
The link is here. 

That's what I have for you this morning.

Happy Friday.

Love...Ms. Moon

10 comments:

  1. Thank you, Mary, for the great link. It's a sad but somewhat hopeful story.

    I love the same Florida that you love and every time I hear Land of Flowers, sweet tears come to my eyes. Our Lis is truly one of my great heroes. Thank you for sharing her beautiful voice and words this morning.

    Amen, amen.

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  2. I was blown away when visiting my Floridian friends earlier this year. They have always been country people and know so much about the wildlife and nature of central Florida. Really wonderful.

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  3. So beautiful -- all of it, and particularly Lis' voice and ethereal song. I loved the music -- reminds me of the old days when I lived in North Carolina, with a boy who was a folklorist and musicologist and that's what we listened to all the live long day.

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  4. You are right, Ms. Moon. An absolutely beautiful song. Thank you for sharing, and happy Friday to you too.

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  5. A beautiful song; a beautiful voice.

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  6. Oh, sweet, goodness. I love Mother Nature. And it's quite obvious that Mother Nature loves Florida.
    Thank you.

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  7. Thanks for sharing this. I know that I would have loved old Florida and not the resort, Disney stuff that is there today. Thankful that there are still pockets of the old left. And you write about them here.

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  8. "a mermaid's dream".... very lovely.
    And that photograph, so resonant of time and place... makes me want to feel the air, smell the water, hear the stories.

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  9. Beautiful song. The Land of Flowers needs prayers for a lot of reasons, water only one of them. I used to work for the company that owned the Gainesville and Ocala newspapers, and they used to write often about declining lake levels in that area. It's really a problem. In Pasco County, where I'm from, and in Polk County, where I also used to work, the lakes have actually come up a lot from where they used to be -- I think less water is being sucked away for citrus these days because the citrus belt has swung to the south.

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  10. Lulumarie- We are blessed with our Florida and with our Lis.

    Jenny Woolf- So much of Florida is still wild. Not like it used to be, but it's out there- the wild.

    Elizabeth- I love all of my Elizabeths and Elisabeths.

    Mr. Shife- And to you, too, you football forecaster.

    Nancy- She writes good ones. And she sings them so pretty.

    Denise- I think Florida was directly created by Mother Nature. Mankind is fucking it up. What else is new?

    Syd- That is one of my jobs, I think.

    A- I know. A mermaid's dream. Perfect, no?

    Steve Reed- My kids joke that when you meet someone from Winter Haven you ask them which lake they lived on. Not really a joke. They were so beautiful, those lakes. I haven't been back in a long time.

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Tell me, sweeties. Tell me what you think.