The Essential Beachcomber

About a 1/2 mile walk north of the Blind Pass Beach on Manasota Key is a little place I refer to as my Chapel-by-the-Sea.  It's not fancy.  There are no padded pews or air conditioning.  Just bare bones sand, sea and salty wind blowing against my face.  There are no choirs or instruments.  Just the melody of the waves rolling in to shore with an occasional Osprey singing harmony from a nest high in an Australian Pine tree.   The parishioners are feathered and are not paying any attention to a sermon.  They are more concerned with the schools of white fish moving across the surface of the water.  There is no collection plate passed but my shell bucket receives many gifts from the sea. As my thoughts and words of praise & thanksgiving go up, I feel my Heavenly Poppa's love come down and invade my heart in this sacred space.   It was, after all, His invitation for me to join Him and I simply said Yes. ...

OMGoodness....is it the holidays already?  I still have a bag of Christmas wrapping paper in my closet that I was going to take to my storage closet from last year & never did.  Sometimes I watch Martha Stewart in all her holiday perfection, making homemade felt mice candy cane holders & recycled snowflake garland & I just want to punch her.  Really.  Seriously.  Who has the time or the extra money for this stuff? So, I'm off to the grocery store for my 2nd Thanksgiving shopping trip to buy all the stuff I forgot the 1st trip. The Salvation Army has gotten a jump on things & is already stationed at both doors ring ring ring ringing away. I got a text from someone who saw a line of people camped out in front of Best Buy for Black Friday.  Have we all just lost our minds?   I head back to the meat department to buy my turkey before my mother gets back from out-of-town where she is visiting friends.  If I buy it before she ge...

When one lives in Florida it can be a challenge to get into the holiday spirit especially if you are a transplant from the north. I am a native-born Florida cracker so my holiday spirit has never been attached to snow. But the holidays are something I start dreading around August - September. The thought of shopping, cooking, mailing, decorating, baking, spending....aaahhhh! I usually am in a Cracker Barrel that already has 7 Christmas trees up and the Alan Jackson Christmas CD is blaring full blast and it dawns on me..yee gads it's coming again. Then I forget about it and Autumn rolls around.   The big box home improvement store I work for can't be outdone by Cracker Barrel so we put the Christmas stuff out right along  with the Halloween decorations  so there is a big honking witch cackling away on aisle 24 with Santa ho ho ho-ing out of the big blow-up snow globe right across the aisle.  It's confusing.  But something magical happens to me on the d...