Sunday Soundtrack: “Southern Accent”

It’s not a requirement to love Tom Petty if you’re a Floridian. It’s baked in. We absorb it from the sunshine and from the feel of our bare feet in the sandy soil. He may have spent decades on the west coast, but his true self was proclaimed every time he published a song through Gone Gator Music. Sorry, California. He’s ours and always will be. We’re just a little...
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Be a Camellia

Last month, my oldest friend Kathryn said goodbye to her mother. It was a hard goodbye after weeks of hospitals, frustration, and medical shortcomings, and Kathryn and her father will be dealing with the raw scar of pain for a very long time. Andrea Hickman White was an honest to goodness force of nature. She was married for more than fifty years to her high school sweetheart, Ken. She loved her...
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Swamp Thing

  After a weekend in Sunny San Diego, mimi can’t begin to say how happy she is to be back in her Central Florida swamp. The first time I ever flew west, I spent much of the time with my forehead pressed to the window, watching the landscape change from brilliant Southern green to hard-baked desert brown. Florida and California may have palm trees and beaches in common, but that’s where the...
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Spring Break

Four denizens of Chez mimi with no alarm clocks to set. Three new books waiting to be read. Two bare feet. One top down on Inga, the convertibeetle. Spring Break at last!
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Orange Blossom Special

The key scene in Marcel Proust’s À la recherce du temps perdu, or Remembrance of Things Past, is the madeleine episode, where the smell and taste of a cookie transports the narrator back to his childhood. (You can see a cartoon version of this famous French scene in the Pixar film Ratatouille). This happens to me every spring when the orange trees bloom.When we first moved to Central Florida, we...
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