florida
Turquoise doors on whitewashed walls, silvery-blue trees like lollipops, white adirondack chairs by yellow lantana, pelicans over the pool, and brown chamelions under the shrubbery. The beach is a wonderful place to tattoo-watch ~ I saw many, many insect tattoos (which were all butterflies), but my favorite was the girl in the itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny yellow polka-dot bikini with flames on her calves and hips, and wings across her shoulders.
Each morning my day would crunch into a complex raveling of spf-application, tea-searching, fruit-finding and sunglasses-losing, until we'd get ourselves out of our room and I'd brush the sand off my journal, find my favorite pen, gather my book, and go down to the beach and stare at the ocean for a while. Later in the day was taken up with wedding things (which is why we were down there) but the afternoons and mornings were for fresh warm air, as much as possible straight on my skin, and people-watching ~ that quiet girl eating fish and chips from a green checked box, wearing a black jersey dress, blue kerchief around her neck ~ tendrils of sun-whitened hair escaping from her bun...
Despite the copious application of spf, which makes me feel as airless as that gold-painted girl from Goldfinger, we got quite sunburned on the third day, lulled into laziness after going into the surf, spotting the sleek rubbery backs of the impossible dolphins, watching the clear green tubular fish and the white ibises flying overhead, and gazing long at a stingray whose outlines were blurred by the waves.
The blue sky had a faintly gold wash to it and a few pale clouds like tiny feathers hung immobile in the westorn horizon, turning from white to gold and then to pink.*
***
...I love my new scanner ~ thank you all for your input. I hope soon to tackle my printer and get more prints in the shop.
*from How to shoot an amateur naturalist, by gerald durrell
11 comments:
Lovely, Brooke, just lovely.
i love how you describe things. would you do me a huge favor and just compile a book of your descriptions? yeah, that would be great. :)
thanks, wendy. :)
B., you know, I would pay someone to do that. I guess that's why people write books ~ it's easy to have it all in one place.
you swept me there with your words. you weave them so lusciously.
what beautiful imagery. the thought of the quiet girl eating fish and chips makes me smile.
this is sooooo wonderful to read. your descriptions are perfect! and they are also getting me really excited about my trip back home :)
Wonderful post, hope I can get there in late summer! The plan is so. Have a lovely day!
I love this post Brooke, and the polaroid warms my heart!
Lovely writing, Brooke! I love Florida beaches :) Glad you had a nice vacation. xoxo Laney
Hi. saw this (http://www.vimeo.com/23224441) and thought of you. Hope you're having a good day :)
kristin, thank you!
jen, I watched her surreptitiously for a while. she was reading a book as well. she seemed quite content.
keia, I do hope you have the best time!!
mdmslle, I hope you can! I was looking around on your lovely blog and noticed a wonderful little watercolor: do you have an online shop anywhere I could peruse? :)
katarína, thank you!
laney, thanks. I've been meaning to ask if you ever received that little package I sent as a thank you for the film? I realized that if it never arrived you never got my thank you. so ~ thank you so much for the film!
fiona, thanks, I'll check it out. :)
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