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common_natureI sure do!
I’m something of an astronomy nerd; you have to understand that the great solar eclipse of 8 April 2024 was something I’d been counting down to my whole life. In my native Dayton, Ohio, I’d gotten to witness the strange begrimed 40-watt sunlight (1) and dappled crescent shadows of the partial solar eclipses of 10 May 1994 and 21 August 2017, after having gotten a fleeting confirmatory glance through SolarShields under welder’s goggles: the exercise was a bit like hunting basilisks or Medusa.
Another point is that I’m acutely homesick for the seasonal markers of the place where I spent 90+% of my life: the violets and wild chives and flowering crabapples, and the two equinoctial yellows of Moraine honeylocusts: neon chartreuse foliage in the spring, and in the fall flaming saffron—turning to orange piles of cornflake crunch beneath the feet. Even the lawn weeds here are unfamiliar.
Until a couple years in advance—by which time it was too late—I had not anticipated that, by the time the total solar eclipse at long last came to Dayton, I would be gone; behold the southern Gulf Coast of Florida’s experience of the Grand Portentuous Celestial Event.
Here in the actual tropics, full fairweather daylight looks nothing like the Mexican Filter(1)(2), being pure and blindingly high-beam bright. In the foreground at left is an ornamental banana plant(3); the hedge to the right of the stepping-stone path is Natal Plum, an African import that’s been ubiquitous in Southwest Florida landscaping since at least the late 1960’s.
You’ll notice a great many fallen large round dry leaves, but absolutely no crescent shadows in the dappled shade of the hedge and the looming palm tree:
Nor here, through the scraggling thirsty stalks of the weeping fig and live oak:
The lawn grasses include nutsedge, recognizable by its crowning spikelets:
By this point, immersion in the sunshine and heat and ambiance of Florida moved me to burst into Disney song.
Not, however, “Colors of the Wind”, “Circle of Life”, or “Under the Sea”. Already visibly reddening in the sun, brined in rolling sweat profuse enough to drip a trail behind me, and increasingly reflecting that documenting Lawn and Garden Flora of Southwest Florida was very much not the Citizen Science I’d longed to be performing on this day, I chose as the motif of the moment an orphaned song from an artifact that never got to happen.
The Emperor’s New Groove is a barrage of zany free-associational slapstick comedy in the Tex Avery vein, with the villainess Yzma performed with bombastic gusto by Eartha Kitt as the Cruella de Vil of Mad Science. The original draft told a much darker story: Yzma was a mortician, necromancer, and High Priestess of Supay, an Inca deity associated with death and the underworld. Lamenting having withered in the aging light of the Sun (with the clear subtext that her lifetime of service to the late Emperor went unappreciated), Yzma declares her intent to take her revenge on the Sun (both the literal celestial body and in the person of the new Emperor) by unleashing the forces of darkness upon the Earth:
The neighbors therefore got to witness the spectacle of a senior female specimen of Homo sapiens var. euroamericana tottering painfully around the grounds photographing weeds on a burner phone while belting out a catchy salsa anthem of resentment. Whether this qualifies as naturalized Florida Woman conduct is an exercise left to the reader.
(1) It looked like nothing so much as that dingy yellow filter Hollywood uses to convey that hey, everybody, we’re in the tropics! fighting terrorists! and/or druglords! and it’s hot enough to pop corn in your parked car!
(2) Hollywood tends to reduce Florida to Miami (Vice) and Orlando (Theme Park Land), and the Local Color Filter is biased accordingly toward ice cream and neon pastels.
(3) Musa spp., most likely ornata. Japanese culture fans may recognize the related Musa basjoo as haiku master Matsuo Bashō’s namesake and botanical mascot; banana leaves’ tendency to fray in the rain and wind is a poetic symbol of fragility and transience: https://www.hermitary.com/articlereviews/shively.html
Tall banana leaves
greenly shade my exile place:
Weeaboo cred, yes?
I’m something of an astronomy nerd; you have to understand that the great solar eclipse of 8 April 2024 was something I’d been counting down to my whole life. In my native Dayton, Ohio, I’d gotten to witness the strange begrimed 40-watt sunlight (1) and dappled crescent shadows of the partial solar eclipses of 10 May 1994 and 21 August 2017, after having gotten a fleeting confirmatory glance through SolarShields under welder’s goggles: the exercise was a bit like hunting basilisks or Medusa.
Another point is that I’m acutely homesick for the seasonal markers of the place where I spent 90+% of my life: the violets and wild chives and flowering crabapples, and the two equinoctial yellows of Moraine honeylocusts: neon chartreuse foliage in the spring, and in the fall flaming saffron—turning to orange piles of cornflake crunch beneath the feet. Even the lawn weeds here are unfamiliar.
Until a couple years in advance—by which time it was too late—I had not anticipated that, by the time the total solar eclipse at long last came to Dayton, I would be gone; behold the southern Gulf Coast of Florida’s experience of the Grand Portentuous Celestial Event.
Here in the actual tropics, full fairweather daylight looks nothing like the Mexican Filter(1)(2), being pure and blindingly high-beam bright. In the foreground at left is an ornamental banana plant(3); the hedge to the right of the stepping-stone path is Natal Plum, an African import that’s been ubiquitous in Southwest Florida landscaping since at least the late 1960’s.
You’ll notice a great many fallen large round dry leaves, but absolutely no crescent shadows in the dappled shade of the hedge and the looming palm tree:
Nor here, through the scraggling thirsty stalks of the weeping fig and live oak:
The lawn grasses include nutsedge, recognizable by its crowning spikelets:
By this point, immersion in the sunshine and heat and ambiance of Florida moved me to burst into Disney song.
Not, however, “Colors of the Wind”, “Circle of Life”, or “Under the Sea”. Already visibly reddening in the sun, brined in rolling sweat profuse enough to drip a trail behind me, and increasingly reflecting that documenting Lawn and Garden Flora of Southwest Florida was very much not the Citizen Science I’d longed to be performing on this day, I chose as the motif of the moment an orphaned song from an artifact that never got to happen.
The Emperor’s New Groove is a barrage of zany free-associational slapstick comedy in the Tex Avery vein, with the villainess Yzma performed with bombastic gusto by Eartha Kitt as the Cruella de Vil of Mad Science. The original draft told a much darker story: Yzma was a mortician, necromancer, and High Priestess of Supay, an Inca deity associated with death and the underworld. Lamenting having withered in the aging light of the Sun (with the clear subtext that her lifetime of service to the late Emperor went unappreciated), Yzma declares her intent to take her revenge on the Sun (both the literal celestial body and in the person of the new Emperor) by unleashing the forces of darkness upon the Earth:
The neighbors therefore got to witness the spectacle of a senior female specimen of Homo sapiens var. euroamericana tottering painfully around the grounds photographing weeds on a burner phone while belting out a catchy salsa anthem of resentment. Whether this qualifies as naturalized Florida Woman conduct is an exercise left to the reader.
(1) It looked like nothing so much as that dingy yellow filter Hollywood uses to convey that hey, everybody, we’re in the tropics! fighting terrorists! and/or druglords! and it’s hot enough to pop corn in your parked car!
(2) Hollywood tends to reduce Florida to Miami (Vice) and Orlando (Theme Park Land), and the Local Color Filter is biased accordingly toward ice cream and neon pastels.
(3) Musa spp., most likely ornata. Japanese culture fans may recognize the related Musa basjoo as haiku master Matsuo Bashō’s namesake and botanical mascot; banana leaves’ tendency to fray in the rain and wind is a poetic symbol of fragility and transience: https://www.hermitary.com/articlereviews/shively.html
Tall banana leaves
greenly shade my exile place:
Weeaboo cred, yes?
