It’s reliable and bold, generous and friendly, and always eager to offer up its bounty. The Florida sun rarely conceals itself in such a way. The muted grays feel so close that you want to reach up and push them away to find the secret sun hiding on the other side. Instead, there’s a colorless canvas sagging down from where the sky should be. On these days, there’s no vast expanse of free, wide-open blue space.
In some parts of the country, like where I grew up, people wake up to the complete opposite, more than 200 days a year of heavy cloud coverage. It was all I knew until I came to Florida and realized how wrong I’d been.Īs one of the sunniest places in the country, the Tampa Bay area wakes up more than 200 days a year to a ball of radiance rising up over swaying palm trees, soft sandy beaches, and homes filled with residents who don’t always realize just how good they have it.
Armadillo homes crack#
I thought everyone spent their days aching for even just a crack of sunlight and then celebrating the few, rare moments when the clouds would peel apart and let a glimpse of gold shine down. When I was a kid, I thought it was normal, this lack of access to the sun. I grew up in western Pennsylvania, living beneath low-lying clouds that cloaked my town in a gray blanket and blocked the sun for days, and sometimes weeks, at a time.
I know what it’s like to live where you can’t rely on the sun. Like a car engine that turns over every morning or youthful good health, it’s something we expect to be there and only really notice once it’s gone. It’s easy to take the Florida sun for granted. I imagined it out there by the Duke Energy powerline towers, breathing hard and watching the distant tree line.Ī lightning bolt from an approaching thunderstorm can't mar the beauty of a sunset on the bayou in Donna Parrey's "Two Sides of Mother Nature," the fourth-place photo winner. The turkey was flying up over the tops of the pond cypress trees - its trajectory taking it out toward the cow pastures across the highway. There was another struggle down in the cypress swamp - then one last, wild scream. Within seconds the bobcat was crossing too, moving wraith-like across the road, then out into the oaks and crowded saplings. The turkey crashed off through the scrub in the opposite direction. Its head disappeared, resurfacing again about six feet closer to the road. A single cat head emerged above the cover of grasses, its distinct, tufted ears aimed forward to listen for its prey. My eyes instinctively scanned the meadow in search of its pursuer. Again, it screamed, flapping hard off the ground, gliding, then crash-landing into a slide across the asphalt. I didn’t move from my place in front of my car. It smashed into the meadow, sprinting my way. It was like looking back in time to when lightning started fires, and the flames shaped and replenished the land - no houses, roadways, or 911 calls to hinder the natural flow of things.Ī scream lifted my attention to the sky - a turkey arcing upwards like a beachball kicked from the Earth, then plummeting down again with gravitational force. The slash pines were heat-scarred monuments of fire-adapted life. The burn had left a mosaic of distinct upland habitats - meadows, flatwoods, shaded oak hammocks.
I am the unintentional King of Bottle Caps.Ī prescribed fire had opened up the landscape here, maybe three or four years back. Personally, I go out to the beach in the middle of the week and when it’s low tide and not so many folks and bring my metal detector to sweep the sand. Quiet moments as others soak up sun on big red beach towels, warming on the sand, renewing strength. Laughing children race incoming waves, shrieking in delight as frothy water curls around tiny toes. Open sands and empty dunes stretch down linear beaches sea grasses sway in synchronicity offshore winds and incoming tides breach the shoreline, kept in company by sandpipers and terns racing along mud flats. Warm Gulf waters wash along our beaches luring us to relax and rejoice in the good land around us. I moved from dry country and have come to love ‘em. Water, wind, and waves are some of my favorite things. A royal tern flies across a sunset-lit storm front over downtown Tampa as seen from Bayshore Boulevard in Jared Kraemer's second-place photo contest entry.
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