Outside Views

It's springtime in Florida, which means we're getting 85-degree days, but the trees and flowers are blooming. I grew up in Central Florida, Cocoa Beach to be exact. For the last 25 years I've lived in South Florida, which is below the tropics line. We have even more blooming trees than we did in Cocoa Beach. We have caladiums, which much to my surprise is a bulb and come back every year. My only experience with bulbs was when I lived in Cleveland, and I loved the first dafodils of spring. We don't get those here. My caladiums are starting to sprout, and should be 2 feet high in a couple weeks. As I took a walk around my neighborhood, and my dad's in Cocoa Beach, I snapped these photos of spring colors. Here they are for your enjoyment. Click on the photos to get a clearer picture of the flowers.

Bouganvillea



Oleander

Mahogany -- All the leaves of our mahogany tree fall in April. The first year that happened, I thought the tree was dying. I'd never heard of a tree dropping its leaves in the Spring. It took me a couple years of raking them to realize that the lawn guy would just come by and turn them into mulch, so why bother. An interesting thing, after we had 3 hurricanes in two years, the tree took three years off from dropping its leaves. I guess it really needed time to recover.


Gardenia -- my all-time favorite flower. The bushes in our yard bloom about a month after all the other ones in the neighborhood. I go through gardenia envy every year. This is the neighbor's tree.



Hope you enjoyed these!

Baby Raccoon Update

If you remember my earlier post about our encounter with a baby raccoon, I'm here to give you a happy update. My son was sitting on the couch in our living room, by the big front window. The front of the house is where we have the two palm trees, one of which I suspect is filled with a raccoon family. He heard chattering in the bushes, and looked out to see -- the mama raccoon! Then the baby raccoon! We screamed with delight and excitement. We were so pleased to know that the baby is alive and well. We got many views of the baby climbing up the tree. And judging by all the chattering, we think there might be 2 or 3 babies. At one point, a baby fell off the tree. More screaming! The mama came back down and grabbed her little one by the neck, making sure it safely got to the top of the tree. We discovered that they climb up one tree, probably because it has a rough surface for clinging, then at the top they climb over to the other one. The next day we verified that they sleep in the one closest to the house when we looked up and saw the mama's paw sticking out from the fronds. Here are the amazing photos we took.

Life in Florida

Here in Florida we always get interesting wildlife sightings. I'm sure everyone does -- just different wildlife! The other day, when three families were loading up into vans in my driveway to go on a bowling outing, one of the moms noticed there was a baby raccoon up on my roof! It was only about 5 inches long, and looked newborn. Instantly, 10 kids jumped out of the vans, and lots of excited yelling ensued. I made a few phone calls to more experienced folk, and the consensus was that the mom was probably close by and would come back for it. They all said we shouldn't get near it or touch it.


We decided we'd get back in the cars, drive around the block, and come back. We thought the mom probably wouldn't come out with 13 people screaming in the front yard, but if she did come back, we wanted to see it. So we did our drive, and came back, idling in the street across from my house. No mom, but the baby was stumbling around, real close to the edge of the roof. Much to our horror, it tumbled off our roof! We all screamed, jumping out of the cars again. We checked on it, and it seemed O.K. on the ground, in the bushes. We left to go bowling.

Three hours later, we came back, and it was still there. Our theory changed: we figured since raccoons were nocturnal, the mom was probably still asleep. We thought the nest must be up in our palm tree, which is right next to the house, and that's why it landed on the roof. We decided we'd check on it occasionally, but the mom would probably come for it at nighttime. Sure enough, the next morning, it was gone. We are choosing to believe that the baby raccoon is now safely back with its mom.

The View from My Window

Blue sky -- nothing is marring the perfectness of the blue. No clouds, no planes. The birds are dancing in the trees. They take turns flitting down to the feeders, perching a bit, then back up into the tree. The tree has a vertical chunk that has scarred over. A hurricane split the tree in two, and yet the tree never died. There's a slight breeze -- enough to sway the long fronds of the Queen Palm, but not enought for the Red Maple. The maple is losing its leaves on this winter day, a normal occurrence in Florida. The sun is bright, the shadows are long. The brightness on the grass belies the fact that it's a rather cold day today. This quiet scene will end when the children come bursting through the front door, only to run through the house, to the back.


And so goes another day in South Florida.

White Pelicans

Two weeks ago I went up to Cocoa Beach to visit my parents. I grew up on a canal just off the main part of the Banana River. We're fortunate to see porpoises (maybe they're dolphins, but we always called them porpoises), manatees, and lots of birds: pelicans, cormorants, osprey, roseate spoonbills, blue herons, wood storks. In fact, an injured blue heron (it looks as if one leg is broken), comes up onto the patio of my parents' house every day. My dad calls him Harry, and he feeds him a can of sardines every day. Woody the Wood Stork occasionally stops by, and my dad has a little extra for him.

Brown pelicans live year-round in Florida. But each January or February, a huge flock of white pelicans migrates through town. They don't stay long, but occasionally they'll come into the canal in the back yard and fish. They don't dive-bomb like the brown pelicans, but sit at the surface and scoop the fish from there. They travel in big flocks, and the cormorants follow them. I came across them as I was going over the causeway coming back. I raced into the house, got the rest of my family, and we went driving out to where they were. As we arrived, they started to pull away from shore. But this is the photo I got, and you can see just how many there were. The cormorants are the black birds. They dive under the water to get the fish. Click on the photo and you can see it better.

This is just one more of the pleasures of living in Florida.

Latest Collage

Just so you don't think I'm only doing jewelry right now, let me tell you about my latest collage. When I signed up for the Fall Fling art festival, I decided to go all out and submit something for the poster contest. Well, I didn't win, but here's the collage I did for it. I prepared a wooden board using gesso, then painted with acrylics. I added oil pastels and charcoal pencil. The photos are color copies, and I added oil pastels to some of them. The whole picture is sealed with a clear gloss spray.


The theme was "Wild Things." I took photos of wild things around my home in Florida. Wild animals, wild plant life. The dolphin is semi-wild, since he lives at the Miami Seaquarium. We watched the dolphin show, then stayed around to take more pictures. This time of year we have mild weather, with lots of sun, so it's a great time to get some wonderful pictures. Here are some other photos I took that day.



This last photo is of a wild iguana outside. In South Florida, there are areas that have huge populations of these reptiles. I guess people had them as pets, then when they got too big, just released them outside. Since they're not native to this area, they have no natural predators. There's a neighborhood down south that is so overrun by them, that they call it Jurassic Park. So far, our neighborhood doesn't have any. But we do have a "Jesus lizard" living in our front garden. That's the kind that runs away when frightened on its back two legs, standing up. He's so skittish, I haven't been able to snap a picture of him.

Where I Live

I'm a Florida girl, a native, actually. I grew up in Cocoa Beach, and if people ask me where I'm from, that's where I like to say. Mom, Dad and 5 kids lived in a house on a canal off the Banana River, five minutes across the street from the beach. We spent long hours swimming in the canal, paddling our surfboards over to the islands in the river, and playing at the beach. For the last 22 years, I've lived in Royal Palm Beach, which is 2 1/4 hours south. Despite its name, our town is 12 miles west of the beach. It was actually built as a land scam in the 50's to attract unknowing northern retirees to a town with a beachy-name but no beach. It worked. I'm here because my first job after college was in West Palm Beach, and my husband's firefighter job was in Royal Palm Beach. So here I am, with a husband and two kids, in a town that was ravaged by hurricanes in 2004 and 2005, but was voted one of the best towns to live by Family Circle magazine in 2008.

This is the view of our back yard -- a typical Florida day: lots of green, blue sky. It's probably 85 degrees here. We won't get cooler weather until December.

And here are some flowers from our front garden. These caladiums are about 18" wide. They keep coming back every year, bigger and bigger. In a week or so they'll die, and we won't see them again until April.

In five days I'm leaving for Portland, Oregon to attend the Art & Soul retreat. I'll enjoy the cooler weather and beautiful flowers of that city.