Sometimes You Get What You Need

I've spent so much time on the water in the last few days. We had lunch today at a place over the Indian River and as we waited for our food, I sat and watched the water, taking in the sounds of the waves, the sight of the rippling breast of water. It occurred to me once again that so many of us self-medicate with the water. Why do you think there are so many creative, artistic people who live on the beach? And I'm not calling myself one of those. Just one of the crazies who feel drawn so strongly to the borders between water and land and sky.
And oh, how the wind chimes of the giant bamboo have comforted and enchanted me as it sways in this cooler-weather-coming in wind. It thrashes and dances and clangs and bumps and rubs and talks.

There's a vase I bought on Thursday at the Methodist thrift store for fifty cents. In it are bleeding heart, a piece of snake plant Mr. Moon dug me from the jungle and a few sprigs of bamboo.
Bleeding heart.
That's me.

The man who owns this place along with his husband has done such a beautiful job of planting and maintaining this lush piece of property. There are so many varieties of palms and lilies and hibiscus and I could go on and on. I could talk to him about plants for hours. He has planted all of these magical plants and has nurtured them and the native ones so beautifully and valiantly. And I, being someone who tries to do the same in my own different geographical area but on a much smaller scale, recognize and appreciate this. Every time we come back, I notice new and beautiful plants. I try not to take too much of his time to show them to me. But I love every minute of it when he does.

I'm becoming one of those talky old women. "When I lived here as a child..." Blah, blah, blah.

Jesus.

Anyway. Last sunset over the river from tonight.

More time on the water.
I feel like I grew up on a dock. I wouldn't mind dying on one but hell- how lucky can you be?

I've been in good touch with my brother White these past few days. He is two and a half years younger than I am and he remembers Roseland with as much love and yearning as I do. That, too, has been a sweetness.

The train is coming over the Henry Flager trestle. My granddaddy would have stood on his porch and counted the cars. I feel him here and my granny too. Another beautiful thing.

The best anniversary. Relaxing and re-living and living and sensuousness and bawdiness and gratefulness and wonder and discovery and comfort and laughing and so much love. And watching the herons fly from the river to roost. And the mullet jumping. And laughing so hard I can barely stand it.

And tomorrow we'll drive home to Lloyd and I'll read more of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings as we cross this beautiful state where there are still jungles and rivers and crazy people and scrub and pines and stars and the moon and and the oceans which pound the shore and creeks which flow through it, tea-colored and pure and sink holes suck all the way to the depths of the aquifer and cypress trees thousands of years old and I love this place. Disney and Universal and Rick Scott can try to tame and monetize it but they'll never (God, I hope) be able to ruin it entirely.

And I love this man.

And I love this life.

And if my father hadn't been such a damn son-of-a-bitch I wouldn't have ended up here when my mama had to leave him and so...there you go.

Love...Ms. Moon

Roseland, Florida. October 25th, 2014

A Love Letter To Florida

That picture has nothing to do with anything except for the fact that I like it so very much. When I was five years old, my mother and my brother and I moved to Florida and it was still a very wild place and mystical and magical, especially for a child who lived in a very small village on the banks of a river where there were woods and jungle and white-sand roads and mangoes and oranges and grapefruit growing on trees and even an island which a very tall man took us to visit in his boat where the fossils of mammoths quite literally littered the ground. Teeth and vertebra, there for the picking up and taking home. The Atlantic Ocean was only a few miles away and to get there we crossed a wooden bridge which bump, bump, bumped as we crossed it and there was a drawbridge and a man with one arm seemed to live in a little hut, right there on the bridge, and when a tall boat came down the river, traffic stopped and he turned the giant wheel with that one strong arm so that a piece of the bridge swung out and the boat came through and once, I swear to you, I saw a Chinese junk sail through and that was only one bit of the magic of the Florida I lived in.
It seems to me that before we moved to Florida, everything was in black and white and then suddenly, like when Dorothy landed in Oz, everything was in a sort of brilliant, tropical Technicolor, everything red and pink and orange and bright green and blue. We had lived in Chattanooga before we moved and that was a beautiful place but it might have been a completely different planet from the place where we landed on the banks of the Sebastian River near the ocean.
Not only was there the true, real magic of the place- the mangoes and the river and the ocean and the stingray we caught off the dock and the cruising sharks we could see from that dock and the birds and the man named Chester who had hair down his back and a beard like Christ long before the hippies, who lived deep in the woods and grew turnips and sold them door-to-door and Aunt Katie who was the village's oldest resident who told stories of when she was a child and there were no roads and the rivers were the only way to travel from one place to another and the Indians who would go by in their canoes and sometimes stop to borrow her family's dogs for hunting- not only was there all of that but there were also the beautiful, wonderful, kitschy tourist attractions starring parrots and monkeys and alligators and mermaids before Disney came and the hungry mouse named Mickey gobbled them all up, never to be seen again.
And sometimes, to a child, at least, the best part of those tourist traps were the gift shops where you could buy necklaces with sunsets made of butterfly wings and earrings made of tiny seashells, painted unlikely colors, and orange blossom perfume and pecan logs and salt water taffy and intricate tableus made of shells which you could plug in and which would light up and those little Seminole dolls made of palmetto fiber with beads and earrings and dresses of incredibly colored, pieced and rick-racked fabric.

I had one, I think, as a child that a friend of my mother's gave me and I do not know what happened to that doll or to my mammoth teeth either. But I have found the three dolls you see above in various places and when I find one, I am always happy and if it's not too pricey (and oh! they are not cheap anymore!) I buy it and bring it home.

They remind me, those dolls, of the good part of my childhood- the part that no one could destroy for me with sadness or with neglect or with pain because there was that magical part which was so strong where pirates could well have buried treasure in the ground beside my house near the river or where I could still feel quite clearly the ghosts of the Indians and the wild cats Aunt Katie talked about and the beach which was still wild and free of houses for miles and miles and where Spanish doubloons were sometimes found and once I came across the body of a dead shark and I have never gotten that image out of my mind, that sandpaper skin, that jaw of deadly teeth. 

I miss that part of Florida and amazingly, some of it is still there. I have talked about Roseland, where we lived, many times. It is one of the best parts of who I am. It is the part which sustained me during what, looking back, I now realize was one of the worst times of my life. Perhaps the very worst. And being a child, I had so very few resources to help me through it all. But I had a few adults who, although they didn't have any idea what was really going on in my life, seemed to know that I needed special care and they gave it freely and with love. And I had all of that magic which my child's mind took and wove into a sort of protective quilt which I could crawl under and be safe. Or, at least, a little bit safe.

I remember one night I "camped out" with my best friend Lucille Ferger in a tent we'd made in her yard by stretching a blanket from the side of an out building to their chicken coop and we had peanut butter and saltine crackers and those coils you could burn to keep off the mosquitoes and I remember us sitting outside our homemade tent, looking up at the sky and above us in the quiet night were so many stars that the word "infinite" took on meaning for the first time.
I have never seen sky like that since then and I never expect to again but I will tell you this- the wonder of those stars, their infinite number, the infinite totality of space, gave me a perspective which, along with the river, the ocean, the magic of Chester and the Chinese junk and the presence of the ghosts of the people who had lived there so long before me, sustained me and lives within me still.

That's why I like that picture. That's why I love my little dolls.

I am from Florida, even though I was not born here. She took me in and allowed me to stay in her hot, snaky, watery, prickly, sandy, jungly, mango-stained bosom. And for most of my life now, I have taken solace in it, be it cold winter or steaming summer, in gentle salt-water waves and freezing cold springs and rivers with water as clear as gin. Now I live far from the Atlantic and closer to the Gulf; I live where oak trees which are hundreds of years old shade me and offer me a bit of that same sense of the infinite which I gleaned under the stars in Lucille Ferger's yard beside a chicken coop where a mean red rooster named Kruschev slept on his roost.

Florida has changed a lot since I was a child so long ago but great fishes still sleep in its waters, there are still old Spanish treasures to be discovered, there are arrowheads and spearpoints to be found which perhaps pierced the hide of the great mammoth whose bones still rest in its earth along with the bones of the men who hunted them so bravely with such small and deadly weapons. And one of the greatest gifts of my life is that I arrived here at a time when my need and my imagination both were greatest.

I love that picture. I love my dolls.

I still love Florida.

Now remind me of all of this when hurricane season begins, which will be soon because Florida does not give a shit that I live here and love it. She is as cruel as she is beautiful and no matter who tries to tame it with pavement and with dredging and with theme parks and with air conditioning, ultimately, we are at her mercy and we are best not to forget that, even on a warm spring night when the air is so soft and the tea olive is perfuming the air and the resurrection fern decorates the branches of the ancient oaks and good Lord! as if on cue, the first whippoorwill that I've heard this year calls so sweetly and distantly from the swamp south of my house. There are already mosquitoes which live by feeding on our blood and the bamboo grows at the rate of six inches a day or more. And you know what? I don't care.
I love it here.

Sleep well but not too long because the wisteria will cover and bind you.

Love...Ms. Moon

Scrambled

Well. Guess what? It is hot.
I did get out and walk before it hit the nineties for once which means that instead of almost puking and almost passing out, I am merely hot enough to be annoyed with a tinge of anger.
I don't know where this anger is coming from. I have no reason to be angry. Maybe it's not even anger. Maybe it's just yearning. But for what? I don't know.
I was thinking last night what it would be like to disappear for awhile. Not long. Not too long. Just, oh, maybe a week. Just take off and not tell anyone where I was going but of course you can't do that these days. They can track your cell phone and your credit cards and your debit cards and for all I know, I have a microchip tucked away somewhere in my body. Also, and of course more importantly, I would not want to worry my family.

My main and number one rule is: DO NOT WORRY THE MAMA!

This applies not only to my children but also to my husband. Do not make me worry. No. Don't do it. That doesn't mean don't tell me about things that would make me worry. It goes much deeper than that. It means- DON'T DO THINGS THAT WOULD MAKE ME WORRY!

So how could I turn around and make them worry?

They don't always follow my rules.

Just last night I went out to put up the chickens and when I came back to the house, Mr. Moon had disappeared. I mean, he was just gone. The TV was still on and the dogs were there and I looked everywhere. He was not in the house. He was not in the yard.
"Where did Daddy go?" I asked the dogs.
They just looked at me with their milky old cataracted eyes as if to say, "How the fuck should WE know?"

Finally I found him. He was across the street chatting with our neighbor.

He had broken the rule, though. He had worried me. I don't know where I thought he might have gone. I was pretty sure aliens had not abducted him or that he'd been raptured. Or that he'd left me without a word. Just picked up and gone out the door and left me. Not that his car was gone. And of course, he and I do have this rule between us- if one us decides to leave, we must give the other one a fifteen minute warning so that the other one can pack to go with.

Anyway, blah, blah, blah. Disappearing. Yes. I sort of wish I could. But I'll tell you right now where you could probably find me if I did disappear.
Roseland.
If you are a relatively new part of this community, all you have to do is search for Roseland up there at the top of the page and you'll find more information than you need unless you plan to do a thesis on me.
But briefly, Roseland is a tiny village on the east coast of Florida where I spent part of my childhood and there's a magical place I love to stay there right on the river and it has a pool that was in ruins when I was a child but which has been restored and it is beautiful and maybe that's what I am yearning for- to disappear back there to hide by the river in the tiny little house with the pool right outside the window with lions spitting on all four corners.

I once spent an entire week there all by myself and it was heaven. I wrote every day for long hours and I went for walks that were so hot I was afraid I might spontaneously combust (this was July) and I swam in the pool and no one was there at all but me and I could swim naked and shower naked outside and I sat on the dock every night and watched the fishes jumping and the Great Blue Heron perch on a sandbar every night and see the sun go down and the moon and stars come out over the river and the palm trees and the bamboo rattled in the wind like god's own wind chimes.

I was there with my thoughts and my memories and the world I was creating with my own mind and I came back different for that and better too.

So that is where you would look for me, if I disappeared.
Which of course I won't do.

But if I did, I would be in Roseland.

I'm sorry. This isn't much of a post but it's what I've got right this second and I am straddling two worlds right now, this one in Lloyd and that one in Roseland and it's sort of hard to balance what we call reality with a completely different and yet so very powerful reality of the soul and my poor, overheated brain is dancing back and forth between the two and I feel as if I am trying to write two stories and neither one of them any damn good at all.

Suck It, Disney World

I can't believe it's Friday. It IS Friday, right? Mr. Moon offered to go get me a paper this morning and I said, "Nah. The world is going along just fine with me."
And so it is.

I am not ready to leave. No. I am not. I haven't done a post on the cool stuff in this house. You know, you too could come on vacation in Roseland and rent this cottage. I'll do links and stuff later. But you should consider it, the vacation idea. THIS is Florida, honeys. Not that Disney crap. Nothing craptascious about Roseland. Funky? Yes. Crap? No.
Paradise.

Mr. Moon and I were having our smoothie outside and the ospreys were circling overhead, whistling and calling. That heron was down by the river. The lions were spitting their fountains into the pool. The bamboo was clacking and squeaking in the breeze beside us. The hibiscus were glowing and showing their doubly-ruffled hot-yellow selves on the wall.
The smoothie was pineapple and banana.

And then we came inside and I snuggled up to him.

Well.

Good morning. Time for adventures. Maybe the beach again. It IS right there, you know.
Sigh.

Love...Ms. Moon

I Went Down To The River To Pray

Mr. Moon and I paddled down the river today after we ate our bacon and French Toast and then we paddled up the river a little way too. I have to say that for someone who only canoes about once every two or three years, I am a fine paddler. On the right side. Not the left so much but I can get where I'm going, slow and steady and thoughts of Sacajawea fill my mind, and also that song about going down to the river to pray and I felt like I was in church on that river today, even if I am not an Indian maiden, getting Lewis and Clark safely across the country with a baby strapped to my back.
Here are a few things we saw:

A few houses which do not suck. No. They do not suck. They are on the river and in the jungle and that would do for me.

An osprey. There are so many ospreys here that after awhile you almost want to say, "Y'all! Shut up with your melodious whistle! I get it! You're magnificent birds of prey. Okay!"
No. Not really. You don't realize how big they are until they take wing.


I took this picture when we beached at a park and got out to stretch our legs. I just wanted to see if the blue of the sky would show up as it really looked.
Almost. Almost.


One of my favorite birds- a pelican- floating on the water by the old railroad bridge. When I was a child, the DDT had practically wiped them out and I am always thrilled to see them, those pterodactyl-like birds, so clumsy-looking, so brilliant in flight.

A view of the bridge from underneath it.

And beside it.

The trains still run over it, several times a day. When he was alive and lived in Roseland, my grandfather would actually stop what he was doing when one went by to count the cars. Retirement is fun!

We probably canoed for a couple of hours and when we got back we were hot and so we jumped in the pool. Which was...perfect. In fact, I was floating around on a big inner tube thing and I said, "Glen, this is one of the best days of my life."
And I was serious as I could be.

We got dressed and went to lunch in Sebastian at a place over the river. I have abandoned all dietary rules and let me just say- it's a lot of fun. Screw it. I'm on vacation.
There were signs up at the restaurant asking us not to throw food to the birds from the windows. This guy

landed right next to us and complained loudly about that rule. "Fuck that shit!" he screamed. "Feed me! I see those potato chips! Your fat ass doesn't need them and I DO!"
I followed the rules. I did not feed him. Now I feel sort of bad.

Of all the kids I went to elementary school with in Sebastian there is exactly ONE whom I know how to get in touch with. His name is Bobby Judah and here's his place of employment:

We stopped by there today to see if he was there and to see if they had any crab for us to eat but no, there was no Bobby and no crab. Last time I was in town I went to see him and every person I asked about that I could remember he would scratch his head and say, "Oh, he died." Or, "Oh, she died." I swear. I think Bobby and I might be the two last people out of our class left. And I hear that Bobby was in a terrible accident about ten months ago and is just now back to work. Too bad he wasn't there today. I really wanted to show him to Glen. I hate to say this and I should not, but Bobby was the least attractive child I had ever seen. He had a rather unpleasant face and on top of that, he had warts EVERYWHERE! Bless his heart.
The last time I saw him, he had not changed much at all, only gotten stouter and thankfully, had somehow gotten rid of the warts.
I hope he doesn't read this. If he does- Hey Bobby! Didn't mean it! Love you!

Almost directly across the road from the Judah fish house is one of my favorite houses in the entire world. A teacher who worked with my mother lived there and her name was Garnet Hanshaw. She and her husband lived in this house and I have held it as a standard against every other house I've ever seen. It was built in 1911 by an engineer on the Flagler Railroad.
It has held up well.

And hey! It's for sale! Got $1,599,000.00?
It could be yours.
Sigh. I am resigned to the fact that it will never be mine in this lifetime. But oh- isn't it a beauty?

When we got back from Sebastian, I took the camera out for a photo tour of Roseland.
Isn't this fascinating?
I know it is.

Anyway, here are some pictures from that:

This is the UGLY ASS HOUSE that was built on my grandfather's riverfront property. After Granddaddy died, I actually had some inheritance money and I begged my mother to let me know before she sold the house and property. To give me a chance to buy it.
She did not take me seriously.
I am not sure I'll ever get over this. Especially with that UGLY ASS HOUSE on that beautiful lot. It's for sale too. I ain't even callin' the number.

Now if that's not insult enough to my grandfather's memory, this is:

What? What? WHAT????!!!!

Yeah. In there somewhere is my grandparent's humble little cottage which was their retirement home. It wasn't luxurious in any way, shape or form but it was lovely in its simplicity. There was a Chinaberry tree out front and a front porch that Granny and Granddaddy would sit on at sunset with their tiny coca-cola's wrapped in a paper towel and after the sun went down, Granddaddy would call to the owl who perched in the tree and whistled back to him.
(I'm sobbing here. Can you tell?)
But to be honest- if I lived in that house now and that UGLY ASS HOUSE was across the street, I'd close in the front porch and plant palms in front of it too.
But "Cat House"?
Don't ask me.
Oh well. Granddaddy is dead and not apt to come back and worry about it.

Now actually, this is my favorite house on the river in Roseland. Okay. One of them. If this one was for sale, I'd call the number.


Now this picture isn't even worth showing you but here it is.

That was the house that Granddaddy built for my mother, my brother and me on the back of his property. You can't see the house now and that's a good thing because it is the ugliest brown you ever did see. The giant old cedar trees are gone and someone's put in a fireplace and I can't even imagine what it looks like inside. And frankly, I have no interest in knowing.

This was Joy and Ralph Holtzclaw's store. They lived behind it. You could buy cheese, Lebanon bologna, pop-sickles and canned soup there. Joy had long, long white hair which she wore twisted up on a bun on top of her head. She cut the meat and cheese with the same knife she'd use to cut your pop-sickle in half if you and your best friend could only come up with three cents apiece to buy a six-cent pop-sickle.
I was not overly fond of the banana flavor.
I guarantee you that if you opened those wooden doors, there would be the Sunbeam Girl painted on the screen.

Here's the hardware on that door. I had no idea:


The road from my house to Lucille Ferger's house.



It was paved then and it's paved now. Lucille and I would do that thing where we'd say, "I'll walk you home," and then at the end of the road the other one would say, "I'll walk you home." This could go on for hours. I have no idea why I was such a fat kid. But I was.

Lucille's house. She lived here with her mother, father, twin sister Helen and brothers Mickey, Dickey, and Paul. I am not kidding you.
There was a giant Canary Island date palm in front of the house then and once, I accidently kicked a downed frond and the spine went ALL THE WAY THROUGH MY TOE! After my grandmother tortured me by trying to pull it out, Granddaddy had to drive me all the way to Vero to the nearest emergency room so that someone there could do it successfully. On the drive to the hospital, while I had a palm frond spine sticking all the way THROUGH MY TOE, he instructed me on what to do should I ever be in the car with him when he suddenly DIED! (Turn the wheel to the side of the road and press on the brake pedal.)
No. This had nothing to do with my belief that something bad is going to happen at any moment. Nothing at all.

And well, that's it. The end of the pictures of one of the very best days of my life.
Except for this one:

Yeah. Mr. Honey (Moon) fishing on the dock at sunset.

What a day. What a practically-perfect day. And now I'm going to cook okra and tomatoes and heat up some crab legs that we'll eat with melted butter and Crystal hot sauce.

I can't begin to tell you how healed I feel, how sweet this life of mine is right this second.
I can't believe I have two full more days here.

I can't believe how insanely lucky I am- not just to be here- but to finally be open to it, to accept it all from the love to the light.

Why me?
I have no idea.

The train is whistling. I wonder how many cars this one has. I will not count them. But I am thinking of my grandfather who would have.

Night-night, y'all.
Love...Ms. Moon

I May Just Move In (Oh Boy, Do I Wish)

Every thing about this place is so damn charming that I can hardly stand it. You just don't know where to look, much less sit.



The fellows who own the house live next door in the "big house" and I have to say they have the best taste ever. Or at least, their taste pleases the shit out of me, so I think it's great. They are geniuses at finding and using furniture and fixtures from the fifties and sixties and honey, that was some fine style-time. For all I know, the rattan couch in the living room used to belong to my grandmother. Or one of her friends.

My grandparents, when they retired here from Lookout Mountain, Tennessee, had a small group of people they'd known back on the mountain who also lived here, some full-time, some part. I remember those sweet old ladies with their soft, wrinkled skin, their jersey dresses, their white hair put up with beaded hair nets, their rhinestone jewelry, their little sweater clips, their huge ugly glasses and the big eyes that twinkled behind them. They moved to Florida and bought rattan furniture and collected shells and got together to play canasta and had a garden club and went out to eat on Sundays after church. I don't think any of them were religious but they all went to the Roseland Gardens Community Church, more for community than god. I don't ever once remember that preacher talking about heaven or hell. I remember looking out the windows at the pine trees and the rose garden, though. I remember that.

And here I am now with soft wrinkly skin myself and my hair is going white and I do have a few rhinestones and I'd like to think my eyes twinkle.

I do not play canasta. I sort of wish I did.

So all of this place, this little house, reminds me of those ladies and my childhood. The river is home and so are the docks and the palms and the cedar trees and the white sand road, and the furniture here and the pink sink in the bathroom and turquoise sink outside and the terrazzo floors make me feel at home and it is so fine.



We slept very late and had coffee in one spot and another. Like I said, there are just too damn many to choose from. Mr. Moon has already seen a little gator and caught one mullet and I've made our breakfast which was also our lunch, so yes, I guess it was brunch although there was no cantaloupe involved. Bacon was, though, as well as pineapple and bananas. And guava jelly.

Perfect?
Oh my yes.



Everywhere my eye lights is perfect.

Here's the view from the sink.


Here's the view of a large man washing the dishes at the sink.

Now. Have you ever seen anything prettier in your life?
I didn't think so.

All right. That's all for now. It's Sunday morning and I don't have one wisp of blues about me. But just to make sure, we're going for a walk.
As soon as my houseboy finishes his chores.

Love...Ms. Moon

We Are Here

Back story:
When I was a little girl I lived in a tiny village named Roseland, Florida. I ended up there when my mother fled my father who was a bad drunk who had a gun and was threatening to shoot her and my little brother and me. She brought us to Roseland where her mother and father had retired because she had nowhere else to go.

Roseland was Nowhereville, Florida. It was perched on the Sebastian River and there was jungle and wild mango and palm and cedar and rattlesnakes and even wild cat.
It was crazy beautiful.
And that's where I spent my years from age five to age twelve.
The very best things that ever happened to me and the very worst things that ever happened to me happened in Roseland.
And that's where I am right now.

Another bit of backstory:

Roseland was mostly a fishing village. Fishing, as in men who supported their families by going out on the Indian River and in the Atlantic Ocean and bringing in what they caught. They slept most of their days because they went out at night and when they got up in the late afternoon they mended their nets. It was a hard living and I went to school with their children and sometimes those kids were beat up by their old men or put out by their mamas if they got skunk-sprayed and I am talking about nine year olds. When I was growing up, if you were nine, you were old enough.

For many things.

My mother got a job teaching third grade at the local elementary school, mostly because she went to college. No one cared that her degree had nothing to do with education and no one cared that she was suffering from bad depression and probably PTSD. PTSD hadn't been discovered then. This is not to say that people didn't suffer from it. They did.
Also, no one talked to children to explain to them why they never would see their daddy again. Or why their mama cried all the time.

And all of this happened and yet, I was delivered here, to this spot on the east coast of Florida which was, as yet, still undiscovered, still unknown and it was magical. It was here that I learned the secret language of water. It was here that I learned to read. It was here that I learned to shelter in trees, to play marbles in dirt roads, to make hopscotch with chalk on the one paved road in town. It was here that we crossed the wooden bridge (ta-dump, ta-dump, ta-dump) over the Indian River to the Atlantic Ocean which was the place where I learned that there is so much more to life than I could even begin to imagine. It was here that I learned what hurricanes were and that trees could bend and bow to touch their foreheads to the earth under the driving wind and rain of the storm. That the ocean, when it was in the midst of the roiling of the hurricane-force winds could bring up creatures from the deep which glowed under the green moon to wriggle on the sand of the beach.

It was here that my friends and I went through the rusty iron gates to discover the ruins of an estate and a pool with four lions at the corners, overgrown and mysterious and which I dreamed of my entire life.


It was here, also, that I was first abused by the man whom my mother married who was my stepfather. He has been gone so long that I can barely see the outline of his ghostly presence, even though his evil still taints my blood. But not enough to taint my happiness at being here. He is nothing to me here. He is not here at all.

But I am, all these years later, here I am again and I am so happy to be here.
Staying in the little pool house which overlooks the cement rectangle which was that ruined pool, the lions still in place,



the pool patched and full of turquoise water, and the little house the most charming of places you can imagine.



The river lies right down the yard and there is a dock, and the dirt road I walked and rode my bicycle on as a little girl is right here, still made of white sand and believe me- it is as enchanted and enchanting as it ever was. There are islands and there is the Henry Flagler railroad trestle and the trains still pass over it and there is jungle and the sky still bruises itself with heavy clouds and the bamboo by the pool clacks in the wind and the white moon rises and lights up the sky over the river and here I am.

Unbelievable.
Fifty fucking years later and this little place on earth is almost, impossibly, the same.
I told you it was magic.
I wasn't kidding.

The little pool house has been restored and rejuvenated and redesigned and decorated and made lovely. The property has been cleared and planted and tamed and set wild in a gentle way.

The river flows on. The village looks incredibly the same while a half mile away, the area has mushroomed with Publix, Walmart, Radio Shack, ETC, ETC. but right here, the heron, the egret, the hawk, the mullet, the tarpon, the shacks, the water, the hibiscus, the palm, the pool...
are all right here.

And this is where Mr. Moon and I are for the week.

And I am so tired right now and need to go to bed in the bedroom in this little cabana house that I saw as a a child and thought, "What sort of place is THAT?" and nothing answered me but the No Trespassing Sign, the clanging iron gates, the abandoned lions guarding the huge pool, now bordered by bougainvillea, palm, and bamboo, tranquil as the moon.

Coffee in the morning by that pool.

See you then.

Love...Ms. Moon

If You Follow All The Links You Could Be Here All Day

Good morning. Here are my chickens, waiting to come outside. Every one of my tiny flock. Here- let me tell you their names. From the left: Daffodil, Miss Bob, Shalayla, Elvis, Miss Dolly, Miss Mable. I have no idea why some of the chickens have a "Miss" before their names but they do. This is the south. We are weird. I haven't got much to say this morning. If I said anything, it would be all blah-blah-blah. Stuff you've heard before a million times.

I walk to the kitchen and my flip-flops say slap, slap, slap.
See what I'm saying?

And pictures- you've seen pictures of everything in and around my house. Almost. But here you go- here's a picture of my side porch where Owen used to let me rock him to sleep.


Not any more. He refuses to nap at my house. If I hold him on the porch swing, he pushes off and gets down and runs around and rearranges the shells and pretends to water the plants and brings me fistfuls of spider webs.
Then I have to give him a bath.
Which isn't so bad, really. In fact, it's fun. Why nap when you can get really dirty and then take a bath in Grandmother's big tub?

I have cuter pictures but this is the only one that doesn't show his pee-pee. I am a respectful Grandmother! I don't want him to hate me when he is fourteen and the idea that his pee-pee was on the internet when he was a baby makes him cringe.
(It's a really cute pee-pee.)

It was almost twenty-six years ago today that Mr. Moon and I decided to get married. Not quite. Our anniversary is a week from today and four days before the day we got married, we were on our way to the plumbing supply store and I was drunk on ovulation hormones, DRUNK, I tell you, and he was building me a bathroom! and we were going to go buy plumbing supplies and I said, "Let's get married!"
We were already engaged.
"When?" he asked me. I wonder what he was wearing. Maybe jeans and that flannel shirt.
"Thursday!" I said. We were leaving on Thursday afternoon to go to Chattanooga, Tennessee for some business and also, perhaps for me to meet my old drunk daddy (who was not yet dead then) for the first time since I was five years old. That would make a perfect honeymoon, right?
And so it was.
In four days we planned a tiny wedding and it was perfect and we left that evening to go to Tennessee and we met my daddy and his crazy wife and we stayed in a beautiful place on Lookout Mountain called the Chanticleer Inn and I had great dizzying moments of awareness that I had made the right decision in marrying Mr. Moon.
A week from today he and I will be in Roseland to celebrate that event and I am looking forward to that with all my heart. We will watch the sunset every night from a dock that flows over the river that I loved as a child and love still.
It will look just like this:

We will have adventures! I am excited.

But before then, it's going to be a week. Kathleen is getting tests and scans to see what the chemo and radiation have done and on Wednesday she and Judy and I will go sit in the doctor's depressing-ass office and hear what he has to say.
And Friday is Kathleen's birthday and we are having a party here to celebrate her.
I need to run errands in town to get ready. I need to do all the things I do here which you have all heard about a million times.
Blah-blah-blah.
Slap, slap, slap.

Well, here's a picture of my kitchen porch. With Mermaid. The kitchen door is the door everyone comes in. Of course. Well, politicians knock on the front door. Even the Jehovah's Witnesses know to come in the kitchen door. Not that I let them in.


That's for the best because if I did let them in and made them sit down in my kitchen and told them what I thought they would not like it one bit. Not one.
So.
Blah-blah-blah.
Slap, slap, slap.

All right. One more picture.

That is the place where I dump my weeds that I've pulled up. They have taken root without so much as a kind thought from me and tower over my head now.
This could be a metaphor.
Or not.

Happy Monday, y'all.
Love...Ms. Moon

Haiku My Heart, Sacred Places

My holy water
Flows between two jungle banks
What church can compete?

This is a picture I took in 2006 of the Sebastian River in Roseland, Florida where I spent some of my growing-up years. I continue to revisit Roseland and every journey back puts a lie to "you can't go home again."
It remains there, as if time had forgotten it, that tiny village beside the banks of a slow-moving river, and whenever I return it welcomes me back with the same roads that accepted my footsteps so many years ago, with the same small houses, the same small glories, the same mystery and beauty.
It was the perfect place for a child to live- jungle and water, wild mangoes and white water birds, trees to climb, white sand roads to play marbles in, and a mysterious character named Chester who grew turnip greens, lived off the grid before there was a grid, who wore his hair and beard like Jesus when no man dared go more than a week without his visit to the barber shop.
Roseland was the womb of my imagination, and the river was the heart of it all.

It is calling me now, that river. I need to go back soon.








Haiku My Heart is the only formal blog-related thing I participate in. I do it because I love Haiku and because I love rebecca who is our gracious and glorious hostess.
Go visit for more haiku links or better yet- to join in.

Why I Feel Comfortable In Such An Old House

I am old. I remember when men were wiry and thin and squatted on their haunches to talk when they got together and built boats, not because it was their life-time dream to do so but because they fished to feed their families and they needed a new boat in which to do so.
I remember when those men, upon rising from their beds in the afternoons after fishing all night would spend hours and hours and hours mending their nets.
Really. I remember that.

I am so old I remember the Fuller Brush man and boy, was he thin! toting that big case of his, door-to-door, and he'd come into the kitchen and squat and open the case and give my mother free fingernail brushes and show her new products and she would buy them. He had a Yankee accent, our Fuller Brush man and he always wore a suit even though this was in Central Florida and he sweated a lot but he never complained and he had a crew cut that he'd rub his hand over.
I remember that.

I remember the old lady my mother would sometimes hire to babysit my baby brothers and how I would always end up being the one to take care of them because she was OLD! She barely moved, but would sit in the rocker in the living room (the same one that my grandson pulls himself up in these days in my library) and she would rock and rock and rock. She would also sit at the piano and play chords and sing along but this was not quite music- it was eerie and dirge-like and it drove me crazy but sometimes, oh sometimes, she would get in the kitchen and fry a chicken and make potato salad and she put apples in her potato salad and honey, it was so good.

I remember spending the night at my best friend's house. Her name was Lucille and she and I would make a tent by stretching a blanket from an old out-building to the chicken coop and we'd burn a mosquito coils and I can't remember the brand name (do you?) and they were a sort of incense which no adult in his or her right mind would now allow a child to burn in a homemade tent but these were the old days when children were believed to have enough sense not to kill themselves. We would peek our heads out from under the blanket and the stars were so plentiful that it was like the rash of the worst case of Chicken Pox you ever saw, that crowded and thick with stars and we were in wonder.
I remember Chicken Pox.

I remember when girls were named things like Jeanette and had fiances with names like Dorsal. Or was it Dorsel? I don't know. But I remember. And I remember when a girl named Jeanette and her fiance, named Dorsal, took a bunch of us kids to the Tastee Freez and bought us chocolate dip cones and when we stopped at a gas station, Jeanette walked over to the hose that always used to lie in front of gas stations with that bell in it that rang when you pulled in so that the attendant (there was an attendant!) would know you were there and would come out and pump your gas and wash your windshield, and Jeanette put her heels over the hose and brought down the weight of her skinny body and it made the hose ding and I thought that was the coolest thing in the entire world.
She wore flats that showed toe cleavage and I was sure that Jeanette was the coolest, sexiest woman in the world and she and Dorsal were like sex on a stick, that full of hormones and kisses and she had a transistor radio in a little leather case and I wanted everything Jeanette had- the boyfriend, the shoes that made toe cleavage, the sass and the transistor radio.
I remember Jeanette.

I am not old enough to remember dinosaurs walking the earth but I do remember walking on a dredge island in the Indian River where mammoth teeth and vertebra were there on the surface to trip over and we picked them up and brought them home and kept them in the laundry room. I don't know why we kept them in the laundry room but we did. We had mammoth teeth in the laundry room, right next to the Tide and the Clorox.

I remember when the president was shot and I remember when Cuba was the place that was going to send the bombs to kill us and I remember sulfur water and I remember the dark, brackish river that flowed under the dock where we fished for catfish and I remember when my grandfather and all of his man-friends wore bow ties, even to visit each other and their wives all wore those little clips that fastened on to their sweaters so they could be like capes, draped over their shoulders, and hair nets with tiny beads on them and I remember I loved those hair nets on the beautiful white hair of those old ladies who were so sweet to me.

I remember when kids were expected to have the sense not to get snake bit or drown in the river or run away and I remember when kids knew how to treat the wounds they got when they fell off their bikes with Iodine that stung like holy hell and Band-Aids. I remember pulling sandspurs out of my body and cactus needles and there were a million ways to die but we didn't. We were tough little people and the bomb didn't kill us either.

I am remembering so many things today, this quiet morning, and it's the Fall Equinox and the moon is almost full. The earth tips a bit today and perhaps it is the moon pulling these memories out of me, or the gravity of the earth in its tipping; they are pouring out of me like milk from a tipped pitcher.

I remember when men squatted on their haunches, wiry men, and kids played in the jungle-woods all day and women said, "Go play outside!" and they wore curlers in their hair, sometimes even to go to the store, and they were never still, and men like Dorsal had blond hair they wore Bryl Cream in and it flipped up a little bit in the back and women teased their hair into beehives on their heads and smoothed over the top layer and it was something to see. I remember the wooden handle and the pig bristles of the beautiful hair brush my mother bought me from the Fuller Brush man and I remember when we washed our brushes and combs in the sink every week with ammonia and water, and summers lasted forever and ever.

I remember when the world which came to us from the television was all in black and white and so the President's wife's dress was gray with black splotches all over it when her husband died and the flag draping his coffin was black and white striped and we had to fill in the colors in our minds and our minds were so busy then, filling in the colors, the details of that black-and-white world but not the night sky which was black as ink with stars as white as new-born silver because those were its colors and the mosquito coil burned with an orange tip, eating itself, sending acrid but somehow pleasing smoke up into the night air and the mosquitoes, invisible in the darkness, still hummed in our ears and when we looked up at the sky to see all of those stars, we somehow knew in our child bones that this was something we would always remember, even when we were very, very old.

Hiding Away

Oh goodness. Here it is my anniversary and where is my husband?
He's fishing at the Sebastian Inlet with my blessing.

The difference between men and women:
Yesterday we were walking on the beach and a stiff wind was blowing against us and the sea was rough and the sky was gray and I was loving it! I was dancing with the wind, prancing with the day, skipping through the surf, holding my hands up into the air to feel all of the wind I could feel. I was thinking of Lynn and how she would have loved this and of all the times I'd walked this beach as a child and of my grandfather and how he would get up before dawn to walk on the beach and how he'd pay my brother and me to find him cat's eye shells and I was in a glorious, heavenly place.

All of a sudden, Mr. Moon opened his mouth and spoke:
"They say the pompano are biting in the surf."

He was thinking of fishing.
Of course.
I love that man.

Anyway, I'm about to go take a walk. I feel slovenly and lazy. I got up at six to watch the sunrise over the Atlantic and it was amazing. The clouds parted in the darkness and the silvery hook of a moon appeared, sharp and clear as anything I've ever seen and the sky eventually lightened and became pink and I watched a plane fly across the sky, blinking, blinking, blinking, as the surf rolled and hissed and pounded the shore.

Then I went back to bed and slept for two more hours.

Yesterday we went to the bar in the picture above down in Sebastian. As a child, Earl's Hideaway held more than a little mystery for me. "Hideaway" was where the bad cowboys went after they robbed the stagecoach. Why, I wondered, didn't the police just go there to catch the criminals? As I sat at a table yesterday, I was still wondering that because surely, at least a few of the folks there are wanted for something although the bikers I eavesdropped on were discussing their cholesterol levels and blood pressure medication so maybe not.

We drove down to Roseland yesterday, too, and my spirits dipped a bit when we left. I believe that in my heart I always thought I'd end up there, beside the river. We drove down the river road in Sebastian and everywhere I looked, there were memories. I realize that this place, this area, was filled with the most magic I ever experienced in my life, and I do love it. It wasn't necessarily the type of magic that is conjured or manipulated or surreal. It was the sort of magic made up of water and jungle and long days of kids playing. It was fishing for catfish off the dock and playing marbles in the dirt road and pretending Tarzan in the woods. It was wild mangoes, sticky and tasting of turpentine, tangerine trees in every yard, and always that slow-moving mucky river, flowing past like a dream of pirates, of treasure, of too many secrets to ever know.

I miss it but I am lucky to be able to come back and enter the mysterious again. Luckier than that, I lived it as a child.

Love from a Magical Place....Ms. Moon