Category Archive
The following is a list of all entries from the Florida category.
Florida Christmas tree 2
Last year the Florida Christmas tree posted on this blog shone with lights.
No branches. Strings of lights at the Cedar Key marina
glowing in the dark like a beacon.
c. Jan Godown Annino
Now for a tree like none you’ve ever seen,
I’ve reprised an image I took years ago, during a visit with
Betty Mae Tiger Jumper in South Florida.
This tree stood tall in the Seminole Tribe of Florida
headquarters, with a palm tree nodding nearby.
The tree is typical. Maybe yours is tall & green.
Red bows are standard. So are basic balls.
But the dolls!
How many trees have you seen, where dolls are the decoration.
Handmade dolls.
Dolls made with palm fibers. And dressed to represent
Seminole patchwork clothing. For the textile, fabric art
& history buff this tree is worth a detour.
(Respect copyright. All rights reserved with these images.)
This is a little visit, here.
Or maybe it will inspire you to plan your trip.
c. Jan Godown Annino all rights reserved
MERRY CHRISTMAS!
Feb. 13, 2010
Meet me & a ga-zillion other folks at the Florida coast, Feb. 13, 2010 just after lunch at 12:30 p.m.
Link hands along the shore.
Let our leaders know how protective we are, of Florida’s shores.
This is organized by a Seaside Florida restaurant owner.
Visit www.handsacrossthesand.com
or the Facebook page of the same name.
If we don’t show our strength & carry the day, we’ll all be searching for appropriate gear to wear for continual beach clean up. Here’s a future newspaper I conjured up from the coast town where I spent childhood time at the beach. Tar balls, anyone?
trees
In parts of the world, but not where I live in North Florida, plants are stretching tall in springtime.
We always appreciate trees when the leaves are new. But I think in the fall & winter, when the full show of their
green is absent, this is a time to consider what our every day world would be like, if we lived in a land where the trees as we understood them to grow naturally, in woods, & in clumps at seepages of water, down hillsides and circling fileds, were only planted in rows. Or if the trees weren’t there at all. Maybe you have lived without the cloaks of trees. But I have not. I grew up by a woods. My mother recited the line, “Woodman! spare that tree,” to me about the youth who was sheltered by a tree & could therefore not cut it, when he was older.
When I read children’s books about the tree woman of Kenya, Wangari Maathai, I felt that she must have loved being a little girl, & that in that time of her life, she must have loved trees. The shade of them, the fruit of them, the branches of them.
There are several good children’s books about her. The one I currently have is from author/artist Claire A. Nivola.
Like all good books, it made me want to know more about what happened to Kenya’s trees. And about how Ms. Maathai brought them back.
So my bedside reading right now is Unbowed: a memoir by Wangari Maathai.
a little help from some friends
Here are 3 places to go when you need a quick pick-up in your writing world.
www.goodreads.com
www.write4kids.com
www.writeonline.com
I’ll have more next time, but these will keep you busy for now.
This is in birthday celebration. It’s one year for bookseedstudio here online!
Books for the Boo!
We keep creepy Halloween in a box 11 months out of the year.
Come October, the ghosties & ghoulies, black cats & bats
are let out of the box.
We hammer tombstones into the yard dirt & place home-made pumpkins
of paper around the living room.
My daughter puts read-aloud Halloween books on a low table.
And she & her father stuff & dress a scarecrow who guards our yard. We will all
carve the pumpkin closer to the big evening.
What are your favorite Halloween titles? Once you read some of ours, these may become a grand part of
your Halloween bookshelf:
SIX CREEPY SHEEP by Judith Ross Enderle & Stephanie Gordon Tessler, with illustrations from John O’Brien
BAT JAMBOREE by Kathi Appelt, with illustrations by Melissa Sweet
THE LITTLE SCARECROW BOY by Margaret Wise Brown (yes, MWB herself, without a bunny in sight) and brought to a delightful modern art interpretation by David Diaz.
Trick or Treat (I want it to be Treat) to You & Yours
september’s garden 2
In the bottom of hurricane season, we check in the morning at the base of our grandmother oak, to see if overnight, something seasonal has arrived.
They are on single tall stalks, like red, curled lollipops.
No leaves, just the long drink of a stem. They bloom once & then are gone for another year. Hurricane lillies.
& randomly, when you least expect it along your walk, they pop up.
In years when we often take in the lawn chairs in late summer & fall, in advance of tropical storms & hurricanes, I think of them as nature’s red flags. Enjoy!
september’s garden
“Flowers are blooming all over the place… “ the character Lydia Grace, in The Gardener,
by Sarah Stewart with illustrations by David Small, 1997
“… It is that rarity, a pictorial delight that in 20 double pages gives more and more of itself each time it’s read, and whose silent complexities reveal themselves with continuing pleasure.” Edward Koren/The New York Times Book Review
My gardening pal Ann gifted me with The Gardener ages ago & it’s now part of my late summer ritual, to pull it down from the shelf near my Frost poetry books & enjoy Frost the farmer & then, the character Lydia Grace’s gardening skills in David Small’s artwork & Sarah Stewart’s inventive series of letters. Late summer is the time when I give my vest-pocket patch an imaginary rainbow-ribbon, for its color mix.
The flowers here, shrimp plant, brown-eyed Susan & blue something that I have to ask Ann about the name, grow in my September garden in the back yard, a flutter of petals and juicy dirt lined with fallen live oak tree limbs that bear the otherwise aboreal resurrection fern…
I like to write outdoors by the garden with a pencil & pad. Then take inside what has taken off on paper & get that into the computer.
Chickees
Inspection
The office assistant weighs in on a summer project, experimenting with different materials for miniature chickees.
Palmistry
These are roofing materials for the miniature version of open-air buildings, chickees, in Florida. The chickee is a raised platform, with a palmetto-covered roof, created in history by Seminole Indians in South Florida.
Mine will be models for kids to create in class.
First readers looked like this
Is this shape a little Kindle-like?
This is a Horn Book. The kind before we had today’s The Horn Book .
Horn Books were available to learners, especially children (usually boys) who were able to sit with a teacher, in the Colonies, especially Massachusetts, New York, Connectitcut, Rhode Island, New Jersey & Pennsylvania, of Great Britain (later the U.S.A)
This Horn Book is for a wealthy family, crafted of silver and ivory & it most likely was made in England.
It is one of many treasures in the Children’s Literature Center of the Library of Congress, where the Chief, Dr. Sybille A. Jagusch, is herself another treasure for you to discover there.
Follow the Library of Congress on twitter http://twitter.com/libraryccongress
c. 2009 Jan Godown Annino at the Library of Congress
