#NewThisDay Writing From My Photo Stream

 

They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot

~ Joni Mitchell

In Boston it was 23 degrees and dark when I boarded my plane to Tampa. In Tampa, it was barely 40 degrees when I arrived. Stood outside waiting for transportation so long I arrived at my hotel in a deep chill, wondering how I would warm up. No fire at the hearth in my living room today.

I'm traveling this week in Florida with my husband who has work here, creating my own writing retreat to revise a stack of poems for a new chapbook. We're at this hotel in downtown Tampa for one night; it's attached to a vast shopping mall, but I'm not interested in wandering stores. I want to find what's pretty and fresh, charming and natural and authentic – outdoors. So, in the afternoon, I set off into the paved parking lot to see what beauty I will see. There is a man-made retention pond with a fountain of spray flashing in sunshine, but loveliness is leafless, deciduous trees planted along a sidewalk branching up into a blue-blue sky. In every landscape, trees  remind me to look up into the vastness; and flowers, fresh and dried, are an invitation to cheerfulness and wonder close up. 

All photos and text copyright Kelly DuMar, 2018, unless otherwise attributed