Terrapin Station

Random FF: At the Beach

Karla says at RevGals:

Hello Pals~~
Random Friday Five is back!

1. If you could sneak away anywhere this weekend, right now, all expenses paid,
where would you go and what would you do?

To the beach in Florida where I grew up going. I'd stay in my cousins' little house next door to my grandparents' (which has been sold) - my grandfather's sister and her husband were the original owner of this little green cottage. I would go barefoot on the hand-poured concrete floors and read and walk on the beach and rock in a rocking chair. Fish a little. Look at birds. Go get seafood from Posey's.

Wow, I could be packed for this in 10 minutes. Can I go? Can I?

2. What is for lunch today? (one of the very first FF I ever played asked this.) Probably a big green salad and some steamed edamame. Maybe some ratatouille (eating up the leftovers).

3. Along that first-FF-I-ever-played theme, what are you wearing today? Jeans, black shoes, and a tie-dye type top in green and white.

4. Along the Today Theme, what are you doing today? Working! Exercising my Spanish muscles.

5. Along the random theme, what is your favorite scent, and why? The beach. :) I have scent warmers at home with Yankee Candles' "Sun and Sand" in them. I suspect that Coppertone plays a large part in the formula...

Have fun playing! Link to your blog, play in the comments, or play on Facebook!
Love and joy to you~~

Surprising Galships

Teri continues the RevGals Blog Carnival with this question:

What's the most surprising connection you've made through RevGalBlogPals? Or the most surprising or helpful thing you've learned/experienced through this galship of friends?

It's a twofold answer, because meeting one RevGal friend with an uncanny connection led me back to another longtime friend from my hometown!

RevGal Cathy, who now blogs at Musings from a Woman in the Middle of Life, and I connected early on. She was a faithful member of the blog, a board member for a while, and one of the other lay persons in the group. She is also from my same denomination, so we had some commonalities there.

One day I mentioned on my blog that I was going tovisit the Florida beach where I grew up, my mother grew up, in fact my family has had beach homes for generations. It turns out that Cathy grew up going there, too, to the Episcopal church camp that was located at the far end of the beach from our house (as did my older siblings and cousins).  She lives in a South Georgia city about an hour away, and the next time I went there for a vacation, she met me at the airport and for lunch...and brought her mother to the beach to visit! It was a delight.

We became closer over the years.

One day, I saw a familar name on her Facebook page...someone I'd gone to high school with in Houston! I said, "How do you know K!?" and learned that X's parents were living in South Georgia, and K was working in Atlanta.

This is someone I always liked in school but didn't know well. She was in band, I was in choir...you know how stratified high school groups can be. It turns out we are now working in similar fields, and I have greatly enjoyed "getting to know" her via Facebook. It feels like a second opportunity to know someone I missed before.  :)  K and her family have since moved back to our hometown, so perhaps one day we will reconnect in person. 

So, thanks to RevGals! For these two friends, and many others. 

#Reverb10 - Moment

December 3 – Moment. Pick one moment during which you felt most alive this year. Describe it in vivid detail (texture, smells, voices, noises, colors). (Author: Ali Edwards)

Being at the beach with my parents in July.  Sitting out in front of my great-uncle's house in an Adirondack chair and looking at the water, knowing my parents were in the house just behind me.  

On that particular beach, my family ties go back 4 generations.  It's not a glamorous place.  It has blessed privacy, sea oats, and  sugar white sand.  It's set in the piney woods of North Florida and so it's marshy and boggy in places and smells of salty mud and tannin-stained brackish water.  There are yellowflies and horseflies instead of mosquitoes.  You look out for stingrays more than jellyfish.  

The warmth was perfectly caressing.  The scents of hot sand, cut grass, and salt water were overpowering.  The colors were as vivid as I've ever seen colors be.  I can hear the waves, brisk as the tide comes in.  This would be great sailing weather.  

I thought, "I'm making a memory now, and I can come back to it at any time."  

And I invite you in.  

 

I wanna go to the beach...

That's all I have to say about that. 

At the beach

It{s beautiful and we are having a great time / tho this unfamiliar keyboard is a challenge.

I scanned email and forgive me if I didn{t look into any kerfuffles in depth.  I am in my Cozumel bubble and trying to stay here for now.

We are off to beaches on east side of island for the day.  Thanks for your thoughts and prayers.  Home tomorrow, when I will rejoin the world and its cares. 

In the meantime...I love you all.

What We Did on the Beach

We went out last night to show the kids the phosphorescent organisms in the low tide waters after dark.  It was very, very amazing as always.

Then Nancy brought out the many-colored glow sticks, which fastened together to make a long chain.  We found many many fun things to do with them, including making patterns with one or more, and also making a huge chain of them and using for a jump rope.

Spencer got so excited that he rolled around on the sand.  Then he went up to his mom and said, "Are you my TOWEL!?" and chased her around the beach trying to dry himself off on her.  It was riotous.

Today Nancy and my parents and I went out swimming together.  We all got onto the awesome inflatable raft that Jason and Shonna brought. 

These beautiful people make it look very easy to get onto, but let me tell you...it is not the easiest thing to maneuver on.  Especially if you are ... mmm ... a little weight challenged as Nancy and I might possibly be, or ages 76 and 81 as my parents are.  And if you are in a fairly rough surf.  In fact it was kind of like four manatees trying to get on and off.  I can't imagine what we thought we were doing...and with our parents...i can't imagine why no one ended up broken in some way.  Thanks be!

Tonight we went out onto the beach and watched a storm approach and split and come around us on both sides...but we had just a few raindrops.  In the meantime we ate homemade peach ice cream provided by friends Scott and Ginger from down the beach...then we had sparklers to play with, and later "the daddies" set off some bottle rockets. 

Tomorrow we head home. 

Forgiveness

This morning Mom and Daddy and I went to church at the little mission in Carrabelle, FL where they attended during the 9 years they lived here. 

The fellow who is now the Vicar there, Fr. Harry, was actually a cousin of mine by marriage at one time...but I had never met him.  He preached a wonderful sermon on forgiveness.  I needed to hear it. 

The first part of the sermon came before the service began...when he reminded the congregation that the note in the bulletin that "Silence is observed after the reading" meant SILENCE, and prayerful consideration of the reading, NOT getting out your hymnal for the next thing on the agenda! 

Forgiveness...I have always felt a little badly toward Harry because he left my cousin Grace under bad circumstances.  (And, but, who hasn't behaved badly? including me?).  Forgiveness in this case between the parties affected is many, many decades old and long and well settled.  It was a true gift to me to receive such fine teaching from his heart and the Eucharist from his hands. 

My dad said something in the way to church this morning (something ABOUT the Episcopal Church, which he and mom have recently left) that hurt my feelings and made me angry.  I responded in anger, but I don't believe he noticed...either that I was hurt or that I had made an angry response.  He is 81 after all.  I was grateful for the opportunity to pass the Peace before Eucharist and beg his pardon.  He seemed very puzzled.  That's okay.  It was hurting me, not him. 

My sister Nancy and I had a kerfuffle this morning.  I can't remember the last time we have been angry with each other.  I didn't like it.  We apologized to each other. 

This is why it's good to not live with my extended family all the time...!  but I sure do love them when I am.  Nancy the teacher and aspiring principal had to go to Marble Falls, TX this weekend for a one day seminar in her principal prep Master's program. 

She said that her professor asked them to think about fractals as a metaphor for new ideas in the classroom.  Fractals, in case you don't know, are patterns that repeat themselves infinitely, and in the repetition, create something new. (Okay, you mathematicians, that's probably the most reductive definition in the world...roll with me here...)

I, today, am also very interested in fractals as a metaphor for the Body of Christ...in the world, the church, countries, denominations, churches, dioceses, other bodies...between family members...

think about the RevGals Ring as a fractal...something that started out looking one small way, which continues to grow and add to itself and change...

the planners of the Big RG Meetup in 2008 will be meeting in Atlanta in early July 2007 to discuss who, what, when, where that event should be.  Keep praying that God's perfect design for us will be revealed. 

High Low

I mentioned "High Low" at dinner the other night.  What, you say, is this thing that are we doing?

It's a tradition Nancy and Scooter have with their kids - every night at dinner, everyone takes turns telling their high and low points of the day.  No one is allowed to talk during other people's high/lows.

On vacation it turns out to be quite a trick to get a large number of loud people to stop talking, asking for food, telling jokes, shouting with glee (18 month old) etc.  And there are relatively few big lows...on vacation.  But it's a great group time. 

I have always loved this thing that they do...then I read the Linns' book:

Sleeping with Bread: Holding What Gives You Life

It turns out that this is not only a really great family activity that my sister found in Woman's Day or somewhere; it's a form of the traditional Ignatian examen.  The book phrases it many different ways, but the primary suggestion is asking as a family or individually each evening, "For what in my day today am I most grateful?  Least grateful?"  Then you "slow down and listen to that which your spirit has already taken notice of."

Here by the ocean, we have low tides twice a day...at this point, our lowest tide is in the evening.  The children run wild across the exposed sandbars, peering at hermit crabs and tiny angel fish, sea squirts and conch egg sacs and scallops. 

I walked along aimlessly last night, veering from bar to tidal pool and back, as items caught my eye and fancy.  I came across three hermit crabs fighting...it seemed over a larger, empty shell.  Perhaps that was my imagination.

Next to them I noticed a cat's eye shell with a sea snail inside.  it was not as brightly colored as this one but looked much the same otherwise:

It, too, was moving slowly and in a way that to me seemed aimless.  I watched for a long time as it wandered about the pool.  Where was it headed? 

Watching it made me wonder what my big worries and stresses are really about...and gave me the time to ponder that which my spirit had already taken notice of. 

This, I hope to take home with me. 

Reading at Beach: Smorgasbord

Today I have read from the following:

The Great Influenza

Barnyard Dance by Sandra Boynton

A Wing and a Prayer by ++Katharine Jefferts Schiori

The Bible

The Hour by Hour (daily office book)

the Book of Common Prayer

Elizabeth George's A Traitor to Memory (murder mystery suspense thriller paperback)

Between Two Rivers:  Stories from the Red Hills to the Gulf (south Florida /North Georgia historical & ecological writing)

Coastal Living magazine

Blogs

Inside of my eyelids as I napped in hammock between reads...

boiled shrimp for dinner.  Say it "bowled." 

RevGalsMomPals Meetup!

My extended family is now bigger, thanks to RevGals!

Here are Cathy's Mom Joe Ann, Cathy, me, and my Mom!  We are in a funny restaurant called "Hog Wild" in Carrabelle, Florida (I am not making this up).  We ate a delicious buffet of southern fried things and including cheese grits, turnip greens, meat balls, fried chicken, BBQ chicken, ETC. 

Our moms had crossed paths briefly in Tallahassee in the early 60's, and while they didn't know each other then, they know a lot of the same people.  "Old Home Week."

A million million thanks to Cathy for making the loooong drive again!

Great fun!  Woohoo!