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The potted white gardenia…

…pours aromas into the air. Its sweetness is almost too much, part of the almost too muchness of Key West altogether. Almost too many palms, shedding their skins along the sidewalk; almost too many orchids on the deck of UD‘s new home on her beloved Elizabeth Street.

Key West: Lush isle of lushes.

For a few weeks before she goes home to ‘thesda, UD has a house here.

The weather’s gone utopian again, so if you’re reading this from Fargo, forgive me. I’m in the best of all possible whirls, sitting in the breeze on a mild bright evening in the state of Florida.

Who is like unto thee, Florida? No one at all. A singular state.

My house borders Nancy Forrester’s Secret Garden, with its mad parrots, so until Nancy puts them to bed, I hear their wild cries behind my (her?) enormous wall of palms. Outside the secret garden, dusty roosters crow and crow and crow. A lush loud aromatic jungle is where I’m writing from.

When I was younger, my sister – the Morrissey fanatic – had an iguana, Fester. Fester creeped me out.

Yet here, ringed by little Festers, I’m enthralled.

So – animals and plants… But also the lazy intermittent sounds of humanoids home from work, relaxing into their own little gardens. It’s odd to think of people living routine lives in Key West, working in computer stores and shopping malls, manning the smoothie machines on Duval Street. Too poetic a kingdom for the prosaic.

UD, like her lonely betters, works too, writing the prosaic and the poetic.

Margaret Soltan, April 9, 2009 6:40PM
Posted in: snapshots from key west

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2 Responses to “The potted white gardenia…”

  1. Sherman Dorn Says:
    April 10th, 2009 at 12:34AM

    If the "little Festers" are thin-bodied, narrow-headed, 2- to 4-inch-long lizards, they’re probably anoles. "Brown" anoles can be brown to black; "green" anoles can be green to brown (and are often called chameleons though they aren’t). They charmed us within a week of our moving to Florida.

  2. Margaret Soltan Says:
    April 10th, 2009 at 5:31AM

    Yes – the little Festers must be anoles, Sherman.

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