I’m a land dweller.

Florida has been really delightful. It’s challenging my idea of what nature I find the most valuable because I’m a lady of the trees, flowers, exploding ferns, not briny waters and scary sharks and alligators and crocs.

There’s also beauty here. Lots of it. My mom’s condo backs up to the intercoastal that opens up into the Gulf of Mexico. We’re situated on a little island, Siesta Key, which is home to one of the best white sand beaches.

My mom has a dolphin sense—she always seems to know when the hidden creatures make themselves known. My sisters and I were lying out on the deck, and she yelled, “I think there’s dolphins!” And there they are.

Their gray backs arch out of the water, fins breaking the surface in a rippling wave. They frolic and jump together, splashing in one area, slipping under the water and bursting out again a little ways away. A tail fin will peak out of the glassy surface, looking just likea postcard as the drooping limbs of palm trees and scraggly Spanish moss frame the view.

If you look very closely, you can see the dolphin tail breaking through the intercoastal

I briefly talked in my last post about how there is so much below the surface that we can’t see. I mean, for fuck’s sake, we know more about space than we do about the ocean. The ocean’s on earth. Right here, a handful of feet away from me.

As a Midwesterner, I often forget about this big ol’ expanse of blue. And, to be honest, the oceans scare me. I don’t swim in them. I like to look at it, but that’s it. But someone else calls that place I forget about home.