my home.

IT's been a while and I keep changing things, but that's something I've kind of had to accept. When I go to a restaurant, I like to change tables. It's not like I'm unsatisfied, I just think the one by the window that the couple just vacated looks nicer, and I might just enjoy my lunch better if I sit there. Plus, who doesn't like a nice view? This is my fourth or fifth blog, and it'll probably change again, so if you don't care, thanks, and if you do, I'm sorry. Another thing that keeps changing is my friends. They are moving, they are leaving, they are on to other things that aren't North Florida. And I miss my best friend, my moon-faced sister, Jessie. And everyday I miss her more. She's a mama-baby nurse in Asheville, North Carolina where she moved to to be with her engineering, beer-brewing husband and her good black dog, Greta.

I wish I could live there and here at the same time. And also Spain, and Germany, and California, and Virginia. And all the places in the world that are beautiful. But in my mind's eye, there is no place as beautiful as North Florida. What other place has mosquito clouds, snake sticks, and bear trees? There's also the long leaf pine forests that reach up to the real kind of clouds, the ones that don't prick you. And when you're standing in the right place, on a soft jot of damp straw, and the setting sunlight floods through, it warms. Even if you're already sweat-soaked, dewed up, and swamp slopped, it warms you. And the cicadas, with their resonance chambers a.k.a. mostly hollow abdomens, sing. Some call it noise pollution, but I'd rather take the tymbals of a thousand- million cicadas ringing in my ears, than one sharp car horn in parking lot.

And everyone here has a love-hate relationship with the rain. Because the rain is like the boyfriend you had in high school that just doesn't know when to stop. And when he does, and he's kind of stopped for too long, you beg him to stop stopping and then to stop again, cause it's just too much. And after the rain, whether we loved it or hated it, the air cools, and a thick wind blows through, and you open your doors for a second, and then you have mosquitoes and palmetto bugs in your house so you have to close the doors back up and crank the AC down. And then they just come in anyways, probably through the cracks you don't know about, and do know about.

Yes, there is no other place on Earth. And if one day, if that thick salty turn furls against my back and pushes me to another part of the world, Tallahassee's big old magnet, the world's largest, housed in the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory might just pull me back again. And I'm okay with that. So even though I may be a too-many-times-table-switcher, a blog-title-shifter and a friend-misser I definitely have never traded my love of North Florida for anything.