I love the backlit effect the natural light provides in the late afternoon, piercing the translucent shell of a recently ruptured seedpod. Even though this is Florida, almost everything here is the color of this pod -- gold and brown. Here and there we are getting early previews of the spring to come -- red maple seed pods and some early blooming redbud -- but most of the vegetation has been frozen to a crisp by an unusual number of nights in the low to mid twenties.
We decided to take a break from the work-a-day world this week, and headed cross-state to Siesta Key on Florida's west coast. A nice break it was -- time with family, time on the beach, time by the pool, time at the Selby Botanical Gardens, time at the auto dealer's service department when my battery went bad... More than anything else I had expected to spend time with my photo gear on the beach shooting a Gulf of Mexico sunset or two. Unfortunately Mother Nature had other ideas and every evening was either drowned in torrential tropical rains or simply clouded over. These shots are as close as I could get -- finding a bit of artistic drama in the late day storms, backlit by a setting sun that never showed us her true colors. A minor disappointment in the end...
I read a great deal ( finished Viktor Frankl's "Man's Search For Meaning", Dennis LaHane's "The Given Day", Richard Russo's collection of short stories "The Whore's Child", got a start on Jana French's "In The Woods" and revisited parts of Harriet Beecher Stowe's 
I am totally unsure of where this is going... a solo project, an Ashley Gang project, something in between? Who knows? For now I'm planning on using 4 or 5 songs as a "sampler" CD for promotional purposes mostly.
The most important thing to me is that I document this sudden resurgence of lyrical and musical energy. Even if nothing at all becomes of it. Funny how that happens... after literally years (at least three) without a new tune popping out of my head, the muse decides to land on my shoulder. An when the muse arrive, she is impossible to ignore. Ideas flow, words appear, chord progressions park in your driveway and melodies poke you in the ribs.
So here we go -- off to the remote sand hills of Florida and a little studio by a dried up lake. I'll work on getting a home-grown video clip or two up here for you to see and hear over the next few months and do my best to bring you along on this little indie recording venture. Welcome to the world of Florida Folk Music.
Next stop is the Royal Palm Folk and Acoustic Music Festival in Royal Palm Beach, Florida, next Saturday (August 8th) with the Ashley Gang. We're on stage at 8:00 p.m. Veteran's Park.
The Saint Augustine Alligator Farm might strike you at first as being one of those trite, old, U.S. Highway 1 roadside Florida attractions from the 1960s, designed to trap unwary tourists and separate them from their vanishing financial resources.
Every spring, hundreds and hundreds of great white egrets, snowy egrets (like the one above), cattle egrets, little blue herons, great blue herons, tricolor herons (like the one below with eggs), and wood storks fly in to build their nests, lay, incubate and hatch their eggs and raise their young above the watchful protection of the alligators that keep the bird's natural predators away.
In return, the gators get the occasional egg and feather breakfast (survival of the fittest in action), and hundreds of photographers flock in to observe and photograph every bit of it. The birds a so unintimidated by the stream of humanity gawking at their courtship rituals that some nests are built with a few yards of the causeway.
Alpine groves is the historical remnants of a formerly working north Florida citrus farm, where oranges and lemons were raised. The old farm -- the remaining structures, including a beautifully restored grove house, were constructed in the first decade of the twentieth century -- sits on a high bluff above the river. At low tide the pilings of the old wharf are visible above the brown water of the north-flowing Saint Johns. You can easily imagine horse drawn carts at the wharf and crates of orange and yellow citrus being loaded onto boats for the trip up to Mayport, and from there to the great ports of the east coast...
The upper window in this hundred year old barn was made of panes of blue, green and red stained glass. Only in the last six months have the local knuckleheads shattered the last of them. Part of the yin and yang of turning a piece of history into a publicly accessible space. I've never understood the lure of vandalism -- some psychologist once told me it provides a false sense of control to the transgressor. Power to the idiots of the world...
Kay and I decided we would roll back the clock this weekend and camp with the other musicians at the Gamble Rogers Festival in St. Augustine. Around the folk scene it is a tradition to camp out, and swap songs late into the night after the stages are closed down. On Friday night we had 50+ players and listeners around our tent, including Jack Williams (pictured above in silhouette during his main stage sound check). That finally broke up at about 2:00 a.m...
There was a time when I could get away with just a few hours sleep and get up the next morning, gargle with a cap full of Captain Morgan's spiced rum, and hit the stage. Like Jack, we are all getting older, though he is the youngest, hippest, fastest-handed 65 year old that I have ever met. The guy's a super star (look him up), but utterly without pretense and ego -- never fails to look me up and remember my name on those once or twice per year occasions when we cross paths... anyway....
Come Saturday afternoon, and our first set... It was actually very good, but beyond that I barely had the energy to snap a few frames, and pass out on top of my sleeping bag shortly after 9:00 p.m. I woke up briefly to the sound of some angel's voice I was sure had come to carry me home... but otherwise slept through another late night jam a few yards from our tent. Some of the playing in the campground continued until the sun edged over the eastern horizon. There was a time....
I guess it's time to learn to pace ourselves... into the sack a little earlier (maybe at a local motel)... rest up in the afternoon. But I have to tell you, if you've never experienced a night by the fire, swapping songs with your idols, your friends, folks you've never met before but sure hope you will again -- you've missed something.
A few photos will be posted in a gallery on my website in a day or two (insufficient energy reserves tonight), including that song circle in our camp. Check it out... home made, live music. It's a thing of beauty. Simple.
Yet another fantastic north Florida spring weekend. No obligations to speak of, we planned to continue the hard work of recovering our back yard after the hard winter. Twenty-eight freezes is a lot of cold for semi-tropical flora to handle, and we lost much -- but are relishing the opportunity provided to replace the frost-vulnerable plants with more hardy north-Florida varieties. So Saturday was was "visit the nursery" day -- then more clean-up and planting, fertilizing, watering and patching. And Sunday was our day of "rest".
Some of our lantana have started to bloom, but not enough yet to attract the butterflies back to the yard -- so we set off to Alpine Groves Park -- a restored citrus farm on a bluff overlooking the east bank of the Saint Johns River. There I found the monarch in the photo above. I was moving in with my macro (close-up) lens for one last eye-to-eye shot when he bolted at the same instant that I depressed the shutter. I thought I'd lost him, but found this left behind in the camera. Fantastic luck! Then it was lunch (crab) at Six Mile Creek and back to the house for more yard work and a two mile walk as the sun headed west. Now a couple of chapters from the books I'm currently reading (Lincoln's Virtues, and Shakespear's Two Gentlemen of Verona). Weekends don't get much better than this... simple.
