bironic: Neil Perry gazing out a window at night (i'm not here)
[personal profile] bironic
I spent most of spring break last week down in Florida with my grandparents. My second day there, we visited a nature preserve around the corner from their house. It was like a little slice of the Everglades clinging for dear life in the middle of suburbia. (Welcome to Florida: senior community, senior community, Walgreens drug store, Publix supermarket, strip mall, senior community, wildlife preserve, doctors' offices, senior community. Sprawl, sprawl, sprawl.) We saw a lot of animals for a mile-long boardwalk loop. Probably because they have nowhere else to go.



These birds were everywhere. They'd stand absolutely still for minutes at a time, then poke into the water and come up with a frog.






Turtles posed for us.






My current desktop.






So cute. So cute.






Lots of birds. Blackmare, you probably know what they all are. Nightdog, you would've enjoyed it too.














Around the corner, an iguana with an astonishingly long tail ambled across the lawn, considered a tree, and hopped up for a climb.






Next to the tree, Mr. Alligator Basking In The Sun.






Some of the birds just had beautiful plumage. (Feel free to pronounce with or without the Michael Palin accent.)






Naughty snakes. They curled and twined and jerked as we watched. Someone near us said the littler one is the male.






…And a tree by their neighbor's house for good luck.







These are my grandparents, by the way. That's my grandmother's walker he's leaning on; he's fine to walk.


   


My grandmother's 91 or 92, and has confined herself to the wheelchair because she's afraid to use her walker, having fallen a few times and broken various bones. Now she'll need physical therapy to walk again just because she's been sitting in the thing for so long.

Anyway, it was a nice visit. A glut of food and compliments, plus slow days, nice weather, and lots of sleep. I don't get down there much, and they love having family visit. They appreciated having an extra set of hands, too; something as simple as putting together vegetables for a pot roast or setting the table let my grandfather take a much-needed break from 24/7 care of his wife. Oh, and one afternoon two of her old friends came over to gossip, and it was like a sociohistorical study combined with that episode of House where the elderly couple was ambivalent about Viagra. After being widowed twice, one of the ladies had recently found a boyfriend on J-Date, and was boasting that he had a golf cart. …Okay, maybe you had to be there.

Date: Apr. 1st, 2009 03:06 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] elynittria.livejournal.com
It never ceases to amaze me what kind of articles one can find on Wikipedia.

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