I like to make lists, J's Favorites, Snapshots, Whatever

Things I can’t resist

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Another little black party dress

One last dip in the ocean before heading back to the city

One more piece of pie!

Bunny butts,

puppy kisses

and trying to catch frogs

Trying to get the perfect tree photo
Or the pefect sanderling photo

Sticking my nose deep into blooming tea olive bushes

Whistling back at Blue Jays

Poetry at bedtime

Lens flare

Touching velvet

Naps

Stopping to watch Red Tails turn lazy circles in the sky above me

Waking up napping kitties

Going barefoot

Green olives

Singing along with Paolo Nutini

Befriending horses on country roads

Another cup of coffee

Making funny faces at shy babies

Guacamole

City love, iPhone snaps, PSA

Market finds

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One bag of arugula for a certain spoiled bunny. 

One bottle of blueberry honey that will be hidden from a certain teenaged honey-fiend.

I love that there’s a year-round weekly farmer’s market by the bank up the street, but it’s hard to beat the 140,000 sq. ft. Dekalb Farmer’s Market for anything you could want.

Note to bunny people: I can buy a huge bunch of parsley, for example, for just 39 cents!

Going there is an experience; it’s the sort of place I always want to take visitors to Atlanta to visit. They call themselves a “world market” because they have produce, spices and other products from the world over. They also employ a huge number of Atlanta’s immigrant and refugee population; many of my students work there overnight in the bakery or at the checkout line.

The market up the street, on the other hand, gives you the opportunity to deal directly with the farmer or the person who otherwise made the product they’re selling. There’s value in that. If you’re lucky, they might also let you sample something… this afternoon it was kimchi which, thank heavens, tastes better than it sounds!

iPhone snaps, Jersey Girl in GA, Seasons

Swapping the sun

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October used to mean the last sunny Saturdays on the beach, the last warm days to throw open the windows, the last long rays of light. Life moved indoors to soup, flannel sheets and listening to the wind howl outside for a couple months.

It’s not that way here; summer is the time to hide indoors with the windows shut against the blasting heat. I look forward to being able to enjoy time outdoors again without being drenched in sweat!

The earth still goes through her beautiful old cycle of change this month, however. Gone will be the sexy green heat and the cabaret act of summer. The sun’s glaring footlights are swapped for a mellow gold moon. October’s perfume is fallen leaves and wood smoke with a hint of apples. There will be chili again (and split-pea soup… hurrah!) and baseball for the hometown team (go Braves!)

What are you most looking forward to?

Small truths, Snapshots, Whatever

Boardwalk reflections revisited

Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin. 
  ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

 

Reflection is the beauty of a time remembered, a daydream captured in a flash of sunlight and sea sparkle. Two selves connect at the photographer’s wrist on a cold October day by the sea.

I miss the boardwalk. I miss its opportunity for people-watching. I’d go there looking for things to photograph. I’d go there often to reflect and turn the world on end, to dive inside and peak beneath the ordinary world I faced everyday.

I gazed into windows searching for other dimensions. Through reflection, other worlds seemed to break free and be united. Nothing is as it seems in these photos. I love their dreaminess.

Photography is equal parts abstract art and truthful storytelling. Reflections provide creative control. Bending and twisting the world into something surreal and obscure, this tweaking of reality is incredibly freeing. And disorienting. And fun!

Reflection also grants a window into the mind. Like paint on canvas, there’s a glimpse of a loved one abstracted, but true. We might catch each other in passing, yet hardly recognize one another. These images mark a place in time: the confusion of life turned upside down and inside out, but also an honest mirror into reality.

All pix from what feels like a lifetime ago in Asbury Park, NJ.

iPhone snaps, Remembering, Wanderings

A loggerhead boil

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“Take a walk with a turtle. And behold the world in pause.” 
 – Bruce Feiler 
I’d imagine that most of us (birders, naturalists, outdoorsy-types) have read a lot about the value of a real-life, hands-on nature experience to convert the rest of the world to our ranks. Be it hand-feeding chickadees or swimming with dolphins at Disney, I’d almost come to think of myself as superior to this type of experience, somehow beyond the magic of another “wildlife encounter”.  I’ve watched over endangered birds in the blazing hot sun, boxed up and delivered hawks and gulls to wildlife rehabilitators, rescued baby birds and bunnies from all sorts of self-imposed mischief, etc.
But I was not prepared to fall in love with baby sea turtles!
Years, now, of visits to the GA coast and FL panhandle had at least made me aware of their plight, but I’d never thought I’d be lucky enough to chance upon a real-life encounter with any. What are the chances of that, right?

A part of our beach-arrival ritual is to dip our toes in the sea, no matter the weather or time of day; it feels like coming home to me! On our first night of an experimental summer camping vacation, we walked the beach on Jekyll at low tide. It was empty and quiet, but for the almost full moon and a couple people out with red lights checking the sea turtle nests. We happened to talk to a couple of them, volunteer turtle nest monitors, and they directed us to nest #62 which looked as if it might hatch that night, in the next hour or so.

Really?!?

Squee!!!

So what if it was nearly midnight… we were on vacation and had nowhere else to be!

So we sat.

And we waited…

(for all of about 5 minutes)

before Jay thought he saw some movement and…

Sure enough, those baby loggerheads were boiling out of their nest! Coolest thing ever! It was pitch dark, but those little turtles knew their way to the ocean and we watched, and counted them, and cheered them on.

What luck!

So a couple days later we signed ourselves up for a “nest excavation” walk with the GA Sea Turtle Center. Their researchers dig up every nest on Jekyll a couple days after it’s hatched to record data about it. They count every hatched eggshell (51 in the nest we saw excavated) and they open each and every unhatched egg (49 in this case).

The unhatched eggshells were pretty gruesome and smelly. They estimate the stage of development each was in before it perished (the majority in this nest died very early in development.)

I’ve read that, historically, some people especially enjoyed the richness of cakes made with turtle eggs. Can you imagine?

Dead hatchlings are also counted – in this nest there were 2 – these are baby turtles that hatched, but died before making their way out of the nest and to the ocean.

Sometimes, live hatchlings are also found! There were 2 in this nest! I don’t know enough about Loggerheads to guess why they might stay behind in their sandy birthplace, refusing the call of the sea. Anybody know?

Two little Loggerheads were rescued from their sandy womb (tomb?) and pointed in the direction of the sea, with our cheers to urge them on. They didn’t seem to be in much of a hurry, but with turtles, it’s hard to know.

; )

Sweet Sadie… ever patient and well-behaved, watched all of it pass her by at the tip of her nose.

(Tho there was one baby turtle she was determined to investigate as it made its way past her nose to the water that first night. I’m glad for any occasion to see her acting like a dog… but know enough to hold her very close!)

I was pretty surprised (pleasantly!) with how much this all touched me. There are devoted turtle-watchers who never get to see what we happened upon by chance and luck. 

I feel blessed.

A visit to Jekyll Island always manages, somehow, to be magical.

Birds, I like to make lists, iPhone snaps, Wanderings

How to vacation at the beach

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Befriend the ghost crabs…

An easy way to do this is to have a picnic lunch on the sand. Bring heirloom tomatoes, basil and fresh mozarella from home. Pack a beer or two in the cooler. Sit in the shade while the locals gather shrimp in their seine nets. Try not to act too alarmed at the small sharks they bring ashore. Once you’ve forgotten about them, the ghost crabs will come out of their burrows.
 
Let the surf rock you to sleep at low tide… 

The beach has stretched out as far as it can go (and on Jekyll Island, that’s pretty far!) I think low tide is the best tide… it’s open, gentle and inviting. Sea life enlivens the shallow water and it’s a fun time to explore what’s been left behind with the outgoing tide. There’s always some treasure… we caught glimpses of small sharky fins and a ray or two. Sadie seemed to love the gentle rocking of the sea. It’s also a good time to start a drip castle… dig a little hole and pile up the sand… let it dribble between your fingers and before you know it, there’s a world of towers, silly and crooked.
Daydream beneath a canopy of live oaks draped with spanish moss… 
Shade is important on a beach vacation; too much sun on all of those bug bites will be very painful when you’re trying to sleep later tonight… I’m not sure how I lived without the occasional sight of live oaks before moving to GA… they are the most wonderful of trees, I think! 
Breathe deeply of sky and salt marsh… 
The salt marsh is another wonderful place for exploring, especially if there’s a paved path to do it by bike! Fiddler crabs abound, as do the birds who hunt them.
Watch the sun go down behind the marina… 
There can never be too many sunsets over the water on a beach vacation, right? It’s all sort of strange and magical. We’d gone from place to place each day trying to avoid the bugs, but they found us, especially, here. The beautiful view was almost worth the bites, though.
(The shrimp and grits were especially worth the bites!)
: )
Count the pink birds when they show up… 
Let’s see… 8 roseate spoonbills, 6 wood storks, 3 tri-coloreds… who else?

Find a little town that harbors shrimp boats… 

Shrimp boats always dot the horizon here; it was fun finding them, finally, at rest.
Be on the lookout for sea turtle hatchlings!
We walked on the beach just about every night (another ploy to escape the bugs at the campground!) and all of those nights were leading up to/during/just after the fool moon. It’s a wonderful walk when the tide is out… the sand glows and the water twinkles under the huge moon. So beautiful! Who could be inside at a time like that? Who could sleep? We had a magical experience with some loggerhead sea turtle hatchlings on our first night on Jekyll… more to come!
Crazy things i do to amuse myself, Snapshots

Art seen (in progress)

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The Living Walls conference is back in Atlanta and we spent the afternoon the other day wandering around the city trying to see all the murals. Many of them are in out-of-the-way-for-us neighborhoods and some of them we pass by almost every day. Getting out to see them and appreciate each for its distinct style was a fun project for a steamy summer afternoon.

Of particular interest were the murals that are being painted in the Summerhill neighborhood that surrounds Turner Field. We’re there quite often for Braves’ games and, like the CNN article implies, it’s a pretty sketchy place. It’ll be nice to have these sad-looking abandoned buildings transformed with color. Stay tuned…

Growing up, iPhone snaps, Snapshots, Wanderings

Outisde the touch of time

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To the outside world, we all grow old. But not to brothers and sisters. We know each other as we always were. We know each other’s hearts. We share private family jokes. We remember family feuds and secrets, family griefs and joys. We live outside the touch of time. 
~Clara Ortega

This is one of those magical photos that I took almost by accident, but that manages to capture some of the truest parts of my brother Brian. We’d just come back from visiting a local auction, one of his favorite places, and he was pouring over the treasures that he brought home with him. In this case it was a box of old records. The look on his face, his posture and the lighting all contribute to a scene I think I’ve been witnessing my whole life as his kid sister… his total enchantment with anything related to music and with old, discarded things.

iPhone snaps, Jersey Girl in GA, Remembering, Small truths, Wanderings

Our carnival life on the water

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“Perhaps this is our strange and haunting paradox here in America — that we are fixed and certain only when we are in movement… We never have the sense of home so much as when we feel that we are going there. It’s only when we get there that our homelessness begins.” ― Thomas Wolfe, You Can’t Go Home Again 

Hurricane Sandy wrecked communities rich and poor in NJ, from the Staten Island-meets-Miami style multi-million dollar homes of Bayhead to the blue collar bayfront bungalows near where I grew up. Its images were unimaginable and unbearable to me: of trashed boardwalks pushed into the sea, of an iconic roller coaster dumped into the ocean, of a road leading into the tide where homes used to be. From a thousand miles away and desperate for news of what was happening at home, it looked as if my childhood had been washed away and that the entire Jersey Shore that I knew and loved was gone.

Eight months later, towards the beginning of last month, I went home to NJ for a couple days expecting to find a ruined way of life there, but also hoping, still, to catch a faint whiff of the competing aromas that signal “home”at the Jersey Shore: the fried dough of zeppoles just before the powdered sugar goes on, the sweet muck of a local salt marsh at low tide, the extra garlic on pizza slices and the salt spray coming off the ocean. All of these live deep in the soul of NJ for me. I found all of it, at once, and witnessed small moments in the sad seaside ritual of rebuilding the storm-damaged communities that I hold dear.

I can’t pretend to be untouched by grief at the total destruction of the shore towns that are a backdrop to a thousand stories in my life. But the Jersey Shore is more than a place; it’s more than its wood-plank promenades and town squares on stilts. It’s more than its carnival lights. It’s more than a staging ground for summer. For many, it’s an identity and an attitude. I love the shore best on foggy days when you can’t even see the boardwalk or the ocean, but can only smell it. I love the dampness and the feeling that you can almost lick the salt out of the air. I love the dampness in the sheets at night when you go to bed. You’d never put up with that anywhere else, but at the shore, it just feels right! When you walk around at night, you smell the boardwalk everywhere. There’s always a far-off murmur of traffic. It feels safe. It feels comfortable. It feels like home. All of these things, thankfully, remain.

*Photo of where a house used to be in Union Beach, one of the hardest hit communities in NJ.

*Post title from “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)” by Bruce Springsteen

Just me rambling about birds, books, bunnies, or whatever!