FLORIDA TRIP CANCELED. Going to Monroe, LA for graduate studies.
All life on earth began in the sea. The story of my life is no different.
I grew up in the water. "River rats," we were, my brother and I. We swam in all kinds of water: ponds, reservoirs, sandy streams, mud creeks. A lot of the water was dark as coffee from the tannins of cypress and tupelo trees, but the rest was a muddy blue brine of the Gulf of Mexico. We spent countless summer days on shores of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida and Georgia, collecting shells, digging through sand toward the other end of the earth, constructing canals, dykes and moats in the shifting sands of the tidal zone (my first study in hydrology). At night we chased fiddler crabs, fished or stared out at the moon on the water.
I've always seen my childhood as a foggy dream, perhaps the abundance of water contributed to that sense of weightlessness. Propelled forward by an old brown and beige Ford pickup, my father showed my brother and me how to enjoy life. It seemed that Dad had planned this series of discoveries perfectly, so that I would later feel compelled to draw and paint, to write poems and songs. It took me a while, but towards the end of my four years of studying poetry at LSU, I began to write specifically about the coast and memories of those many special places. Before I moved to Ohio, Dad took us the kids on one last road trip to Key West. It was a return to the sea, to the water where our childhood began.
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| Me, Dad, Jace, Kelly and Joey after snorkeling the coral reefs! |
