Learning a Place

My first months here in Florida were strange and disorienting.   I felt a bit like Alice or Dorothy.  I certainly wasn't in California anymore, that was for sure.  Sometime around February or March, the strangeness began to wear off and I began to pay attention to this place I had come to call home.  I suspect some of this was time here.  I think too, Bryan and I had begun to think we might stay more than a year or two, maybe call this place home.  And so, at the possibility of setting roots, I did what I always did when coming to call a place home, I began to walk it and study it, learn it with my body and my senses.  I read it's history too, but the body has to come to know a place if there's any hope of calling it home.

Bryan's folks came this last week and we took the little boat up the New River.  Bryan sees these canals every time he drives, but I see them less frequently.  In such a temperate place, seasonal changes are small, barely noticeable to someone used to greater variations.  Take the birds, for example.  In the extreme heat of July and August, the birds grow quiet.  Perhaps here it's opposite and instead of migrating in the winter to warmer climes they migrate in the summer to cooler lands.  All I know is that for those few months, the day starts with an odd quiet and ends that way too.  I didn't know last year when we arrived how deliriously the birds sing, how strange the songs are, even the grackle exotically tuneful here as it wasn't in Phoenix.

Apparently in June the Poinciana blooms, glorious and gaudy in her scarlet blossoms.  I didn't know there was a song about them, but Bryan's dad knows tons of songs, many obscure.  He sang this one as we traveled the New River one rather lovely morning.  He didn't know all the words but I searched and found them.  The melody is haunting, fitting the magic of this tree, this place of big dreams, many realized, just as many not.  And I wonder if there is a message for me in this tree, in this song.  I came here for love and sometimes I find it hard to live in that "love, come what may" way I want to.  I don't know but I suspect I will figure it out.  The universe understands I'm a bit dense and gives me plenty of hints, sometimes knocks me over the head with them.  

Here are the lyrics and a link to the Nat King Cole version of the song:

Blow...tropic wind...
Sing a song...through the trees.

Trees...sigh to me...
Soon my love...I will see.


Poinciana,
Your branches speak to me of love.
Pale moon is casting shadows from above.

Poinciana, 
Somehow I feel the jungle heat
Within me, there grows a rhythmic, savage 
beat.


Love is everywhere, its magic perfume fills the air.
To and fro, you sway, my heart's in time, 
I've learned to care.

Poinciana,
From now until the dawning day,
I'll learn to love forever come what may.

Blow....tropic wind,
Sing a song through the trees.
Trees...sigh to me
Soon my love... I will see.

Poinciana...