#NewThisDay Writing From My Photo Stream

Great Blue Heron, Gulf of Mexico

Beating most of the shell pickers, I got to the beach at sunrise. The birds were hungry, diving and fishing all along the Gulf. I walked to the bridge and that’s where I saw the great blue heron relaxing on shore. I was tired this morning, but satisfied, deeply, with the landscape and sky. Frank and I woke for no good reason around 3 or 4; restless, we chatted in bed, all about the arrival of our kids, talking over the little intricacies and issues and pleasures of all of us being together. After my walk, I did work some, but it was a day to take a kayak jaunt - all of us in the bay from a rental place nearby. It was windy and fun and hard work and the highlight was the sighting of a pair of cheerful, smiling dolphins - I saw them face on from a few feet away! We all pulled our kayaks up into the lagoon I had just photographed from the other side this morning, with the sun coming up. We walked across the narrow strip of land to Beer Can Island where we sat and ate our lunch and dipped in the Gulf. A windy paddle back across the Bay, but we were energetic and happy in the sunshine and warm wind and being together. Even the broken footed daughter held her own. As we neared home, on a small island of trees full of shorebirds, we all spotted a beautiful pink bird. Turns out, I looked it up when we got home, and it was a Roseate Spoonbill. I held a writing workshop in the late afternoon that was hugely satisfying, and then we went into Sarasota, and as we were leaving the restaurant a friend from the International Women’s Writing Guild who has been in my playwriting workshops - who lives in Boston - ran out of the restaurant where we had just dined and called my name! We hugged in the street, and that was the perfect ending to a perfect day (despite my crabby mood on the way to dinner for which I wrote everyone apology, one by one, at dinner, on the paper coasters, and I was forgiven by all).