Santiago Finally Gets His Day in the Sun! Introducing ‘Santiago: True Tales of a Little Bug in a Big World’

For everyone wondering whatever happened to dear little Santiago, fear not. He has not been forgotten. And now he has been immortalized in a book about his many true adventures. Santiago: True Tales of a Little Bug in a Big World, which was released on June 5th, 2019, just in time for World Environment Day! Yes, it’s a long title. But it tells you exactly what the book is about. I like to manage expectations like that. Check out http://www.lateshiftmedia.com/children-s-books for more info. Or head over to his Facebook page (because of COURSE he has social media…): http://www.facebook.com/alittlebuginabigworld

The book is a middle-grade kids’ book told from Santiago’s viewpoint of what it’s like to be a wild animal raised by a human parent. While the story is whimsical and light in many ways, it also tackles much larger and deeper subjects, like finding your voice and place in the world, facing the challenges of growing up, and practicing understanding and tolerance of things different from you. But the book isn’t just for kids. It appeals to adults as well, especially those still struggling to find their path and parents struggling with raising kids and making choices that you hope are right and best for your child. It’s really just fun for the whole family. And I hope it will make more people think more positively of insects. Here’s a little update on what else has been going on, since I know I have been silent for quite some time now. In addition to finishing the book and promoting it through podcasts, school and library visits, and teaching workshops based on it, my life lately has also been dedicated to writing and recording new music, teaching photography and creativity workshops, starting up a podcast (Nature Knows), learning how to edit videos, and running online events. It’s amazing how many iterations a life can take. 

What I learned working on the book that I’d like to share with everyone thinking of writing a book is the following:

It is amazing the number of times you can read, re-read, re-read, and re-read again and STILL manage to miss typos.

Revision is your best friend. As is a good editor and good copyeditor. And a good illustrator. If you don’t have design experience, best to hire someone who does. I was lucky – I know design already, and, being a photographer who used photos of Santiago in the book, it was easy for me to put the cover art together. But if that’s not your area of expertise (and honestly, even if it is, it’s never a bad idea to get some outside ideas – you never know what genius design someone else will bring to the table), definitely hire someone to do it for you.

Research your market before setting pen to paper to get to know your specific genre.

Schedule writing time. If you don’t schedule it, you won’t do it, I promise you. We all have a habit of finding ways to fill the space. I see you, social media… Set time in your calendar and stick to it, even if you spend the time doodling. It’s about getting your head in the game and it’s a funny trick to make you believe you are a writer and not just someone who would like to be one.

Since the book features actual photos of my mantis child, I had to curate all the pictures I had of him and size them appropriately. Which takes a lot longer that one might think. Mostly because I thought I was all organised and had put all the pictures in folders. But I was clearly deluding myself about my organisational forethought. Because not only was there minimal method to the madness of the folders I had created, but some of the photos came from two different cell phones, one of which I wasn’t using anymore. It was a process.

Related but not, in addition to Santiago’s photos, I’ve also finally started to curate and catalog my wildlife photos and created a coffee table book called Faces of Extinction, a portion of the proceeds of which supports an NGO called Wild Tomorrow Fund. Wild Tomorrow Fund is based in NYC but supports conservation efforts in South Africa, including an organisation I worked for when I first moved to South Africa. Wild Tomorrow Fund purchases equipment and land for conservation purposes, such as uniforms for rangers and acreage to increase wildlife habitat. That book is also available on the website listed above.

It’s been a busy year, despite the pandemic. Whew!

South African Adventure #11 – (Re)learning how to write, spell, and speak

First of all, there are 11 official languages in South Africa. Yes, 11. I am only going to focus on English in this blog, mainly because it’s the only SA language I speak. I may have picked up some phrases in Zulu, Shangaan, and Afrikaans, but conversant I am not. I am exceptional, however, at getting my point across via charade-type gesturing nowadays.

South Africans follow the same spelling and writing conventions as the Brits, Aussies, and Kiwis. For a writer raised in the US, this is a challenge. But I’ve willingly followed their lead, replacing letters, altering spellings and grammar rules, and changing inflections all over the lexicon. This hasn’t been without mishaps, though. I’ve certainly written text that had half American spellings and half South African ones. If I wasn’t detailed in my copywriting before, I’ve certainly learned to be so living here. Let myself even think about daydreaming and I’ll be confusing spellings and terminology all over the pages and screens I publish on.

South Africans spell things the same way as the Brits (using ‘s’ where Americans use ‘z’, such as in ‘organisation’; using a ‘c’ for an ‘s’, such as in ‘licence’). They use the same grammatical rules as the Brits as well (which was a challenge for me, who’d not only grown up under the American system of writing but was also schooled intensely in AP and Chicago Manual of Style writing and editing…). I still find myself asking South Africans about the proper way to say and write certain words. Though I have to admit that, like many Americans, a lot of South Africans don’t know how to spell/write/speak grammatically correctly, a trend I’ve noticed gaining speed worldwide. I chalk it up to a plethora of exposure to bad writing (thank you, internet), poor blogging, devaluing of the craft of language, and too many people who call themselves writers and editors but have never bothered to learn the actual craft of either. Why do so many people think you don’t have to know how to write to call yourself a writer? Could a doctor could go out and practice without first going through pre-med, medical school, residencies, etc.? Or a lawyer practice law without actually studying law and passing the bar exam? Why any so-called writer believes they should have their own special ‘we don’t need to actually KNOW how to write to be considered writers’ category is nonsensical (and arrogant) to me. Okay, off the soapbox, tangent truncated.

South Africans not only spell differently from Americans, they speak differently too. This might seem like it should’ve been obvious (it is, after all, another country), and I knew they did, but it still hit me hard when I arrived here. I couldn’t always understand what the people around me were saying. And, in fairness, they couldn’t always understand me. South African pronunciation is in many ways similar to British pronunciation, but the accent is different. Some phrasing and pronunciations have a harder, more gutteral feel. It is not an easy accent to replicate. I am a musician. I usually have an ear for the musicality of a language and a dialect, and I pick up accents quickly. Not so here. I am firmly American in my speech. Except when it comes to the slang. And South Africa has some beautiful slang. Imagine all the unique slang that a country of 11 national languages can produce! Lekker. Aweh. Eish. Given the right amount of inflection and gesture, these and so many other words can convey in one or two syllables every emotion and nuance you need to know about a moment in time.

I hadn’t realised how many South Africanisms I’d picked up until I went back to the US a few months ago, nor how many pronunciations I’d adopted. I found myself saying ZEH-brah for zebra and GAH-raj (like the Taj in Taj Mahal) for garage. Garbage was now bin. Yebo replaced yes. A barbecue was a braai (the braai is itself a blog post – braai-ing is a revered activity here, spoken of in ecstatic tones and elevated to a spiritual endeavour, especially if you hold the position of braai master). Sausage is boerwoers (and despite my best eforts, phonetically spelling out boerwoers in a way that does justice to the word is beyond my descriptive abilities). A street light was a robot. And a truck? Nope, a bakkie.

I had even inadvertently fallen into saying toe-MAH-toe, even though that is one situation I find annoyingly inconsistent. Why are tomato and potato, which are spelled exactly the same, pronounced differently in South Africa? No South African could give me an answer on that one. But then again, that seems to be the norm with the English language, no matter what accent is used to speak it. American English has its fair share of stupid inconsistencies as well.  I pity anyone who has to learn English. I was an English major and I still struggle.

Anyhoo, I find myself often having to correct myself no matter where I am these days. Which brings me to my point. Why don’t we just standardise/ize English? I studied Spanish. From what I recall, there is really only one Spanish. There is slang, but the language itself isn’t unique to each country that speaks it. Sure, there are nuances, and trying to understand a Cuban, a Puerto Rican, an Argentine and a Spaniard all in one room takes a level of multi-tasking I cannot produce, but they spell things the same way, and the grammar is the same. WTF happened with English?

And the accent? I’m all for regionalisms and each part of the world having their own culture, but really, why the need to make it a POINT to change up the manner of speech? And yes, it was intentionally changed way back when. Apparently, the bluebloods amongst the Brits felt a need to differentiate themselves from those damn Yanks and Brits of the ‘lesser’ classes, and they poshed it up. Read more about it here. I swear it must be a human nature thing to feel this irrepressible need to be superior to something or someone. It’s like we have a collective culture of bullies with low self-esteem. Have so few of us matured beyond third grade?

Don’t get me wrong. I do love the accent, and I admit it – I feel a special sense of pride that I can now pull out 42 ways to rewrite a sentence, depending on which style guide you’re adhering to. But I do get tired of constantly having to rewrite and readjust according to which English country I happen to be in at the moment. It’s the 21st century. There are apparently two billion (yes, billion) native English speakers in the world. Can’t we all just get on the same page and read from the same book without having to convert it to placate cultural egos?

But what does this have to do with living in the bush? Well, not much, really. This is more about life in South Africa (and random general challenges you face while living abroad). It’s easy to understand how you can feel alone and out of sorts in a place where you don’t speak the language. It’s harder to imagine feeling that way in a place where many people actually speak the same language as you. But trust me, you do. You cannot help but feel like an outsider every time you open your mouth. It’s an unfortunate part of being an expat. But it does eventually get better, and it gets better faster the more quickly you learn the local lingo and start using it.

Oh, if you feel like facepalming for an hour, ask a South African about their definition of the multiple variations of now (now now, just now, right now). You’ll end up with a migraine if you try to figure it out. Don’t bother trying. Just resign yourself to the fact that time is a relative term here. And that’s not always a bad thing.

If you want to learn a few other pure South Africanisms, check out 43 Favourite South Africanisms

 

 

Also check out this Guide to South African Slang

If you need help with some pronunciations, let me know and I’ll do my best to spell the words and phrases out phonetically. Except, as I mentioned, for boerwoers. You’ll need to find a true South African to help you with that one.

Why I came to Africa – It all comes back to one of my heroes

a fly on the wall

We cannot live through a single day without making an impact on the world around us — and we have a choice as to what sort of difference we make… Children are motivated when they can see the positive results their hard work can have.  – Jane Goodall

When I was a little girl, I was fascinated by Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. At the time, the show was only on on Sunday nights, so if you missed it, you missed out. There was no DVR, and episodes weren’t replayed twelve times a week. You were basically just SOL (shit outta luck). I would plan my days to make sure I didn’t miss an episode, and I was broken up if I did (especially if the episode was about animals I loved most, like sharks, apes, big cats, or elephants).

What I recall most vividly about those documentaries were two things: 1. they were so much less sensationalised (nay, they weren’t even REMOTELY sensationalised) than much of the crap that Nat Geo and Discovery air now – Shark Week, for example, has devolved into a joke, much to my dismay; and 2. there were women involved who were doing things other than painting their nails and shopping. They were tromping through mud and swamps and desert, bundu bashing, 4-x4ing their way around remote locales and hidden paradises. They were living in and among the natural world, connected to something I felt so separated from in my little NJ home by the sea.

My little heart yearned to join these women, to step away from what everyone thought was my pre-determined life, to flee the shackles of what was expected of me. My body ached with the desire to breathe the air at the top of Kilimanjaro, or to swim with whale sharks in Madagascar, or to stealthily slip through the dense brush as I searched for some new species, or to climb the steep ravines and hillside tracking gorillas in the mist like Dian Fossey. I wanted out. And I wanted outside.

I met Jane Goodall through those documentaries, and she changed my life.

Now, the reality is, I’ve never ACTUALLY met Jane Goodall. I would love to meet her one day, but I haven’t yet. I HAVE read so much of her work, and I’ve learned tremendous amounts about animal behaviour from her. But more importantly, I learned that I, as a female, could go hang out in the bush with the animals and IT WAS OKAY. Not only was it okay, it was awesome!

Thanks, Jane, for inspiring me to toss behind my life in America and drop myself into the colourful madness of South Africa, with nary a job in sight, doing the kinds of things I wanted to be doing. But it all worked out in the end.

I’d like to think everyone in this world has their own Jane to push them, to remind them to live out their dreams, to inspire them to care about more than just themselves. I hope that maybe I am a Jane to some people, that I’ve done something or been someone who has inspired others to live their best life. One can only hope.

I doubt I will ever achieve even an iota of what this remarkable woman has achieved. But that will never stop me from trying.

Thanks, Jane. Though we may never meet, know that you have touched another life profoundly. By the way, how cool is this book? Me…Jane

And that’s today’s #buzzfromthebush.

 

All rights reserved. ©2015 Jennifer Vitanzo

All things big and small – grace among the wild things

Leonard, the little castaway

Lenny climbs to get a better view

I read an article today that actually caused me to stop what I was doing. I focused. This doesn’t happen often. It was called “When Nature Speaks, Who Are You Hearing?” The reason I mention it is that something about what I read compelled me to start writing. For this, I apologise. There’s a good chance that no matter how hard I try to keep this post from rambling off into the stratosphere, it probably will, despite my best intentions. I blame my befuddled brain.

If you’re wondering where I’ve been, to be honest, I’ve been struggling to write lately. Too much work, too little energy, too much pressure on myself to produce something of Pulitzer calibre. Which, let’s be honest, is not likely. I mean, it’s not like I’ve ever let my fear of not saying something profound keep me from saying something anyway. But lately I’ve been feeling…I don’t know. Pensive? Apprehensive? Doubtful? Not sure what it is. Maybe it’s all of the above. But I haven’t wanted to write. Or, better yet, I haven’t felt I had anything to say that anyone might care to hear. I’ve actually been feeling lost in my thoughts. Like I’m in a full-on lexicographic labyrinth and I have no idea where I’m trying to go. I cannot find the magic words.

Since childhood, I have had a tenuous and tumultuous relationship with writing. Throughout life, I found myself using writing as an outlet for every ounce of darkness and light I had tucked inside me. And it seemed to scare people a little. Or a lot, if you were my parents. So it was something I was comfortable with, yet afraid of, if that makes any sense. It was yet another thing about me that made me different, and I was kind of tired of being different. I just wanted to be.

For as long as I can remember, I have found myself unable to grab the right word out of my brain to say exactly what it is I want to say. I don’t like public speaking for this same reason. And I always get told I speak too quickly, which is equivalent to being told you need to chill out, you need to calm down, you need to be someone you are not. I cannot help that my brain moves faster than my tongue is capable of keeping pace. But whether it’s something I can control or not, hearing those words has kept me from opening my mouth in the first place. And by extension, it’s kept me from opening my thoughts up to scrutiny. I’ve held in much I would’ve loved to have bled out over the page. Lovely image, I know. But a verbal hemorrhage is sort of what I feel needs to happen.

What does this all have to do with me being in South Africa, loving my wildlife, and writing a headline such as the one this post has? Well, perhaps all the energy I’ve kept tightly bound inside has finally broken through some poorly defended section of my brain. Lately, I’ve felt like my entire body is on fire, reverberating with these wild vibrations that are pushing against my insides and squeezing my heart and lungs ever tighter and tighter. I often can’t breathe. It’s the closest approximation I have of what it must feel like to jump out of your skin.

Sitting here, listening to clicking stream frogs sending their unanswered love calls into the cool night air, I wonder some times whether I feel so tightly wound because I simply do not belong where I am. I mean that in a physical and a metaphysical way. I love the pulse of a city, but I melt in the masses of people, industry, technology and closed spaces. I don’t belong in cities. In nature, I feel like my whole being suddenly feels a release. And yet in the bush I’m still bound. I can’t just wander off, unless I have a death wish. I must stay within the confines of a small space, still watching the world from what feels like a large, wide-open window. I’m stuck in between.

Morning with a monitor

It’s in times like these that I relish the small things. And I really mean the small things: the lizards, the frogs, the birds, the rodents, and yes, even the spiders and snakes. I feel more connected to the animals and invertebrates that cluster around the warmth of my home than I do the behemoths of the land that everyone comes to Africa to see. By no means am I implying I don’t like the big guys. Elephants, lions, rhinos, buffalo…I love them all. But I am disconnected from them. I cannot reach out and touch them. In many ways, they are as close to me as are the stars in the sky. I can watch, I can admire. But I cannot connect.

The smaller creatures come into my world, sharing my space with me. They sit with me, they chatter away to me, they eat my soap and my mosquitos. They keep me company in what can be a very lonely, cold world. And this unlikely friendship, if you can call it that, blesses my life with a sweet, gentle grace. I feel alive. I feel part of something. I feel real.

These little things never get the attention of their much larger wildlife cousins. For some reason, so many other people I’ve met seem to feel they don’t matter. Or they aren’t good enough to care about.

Waldo’s wilder cousin

I think about my little baby gecko, Leonard. Most people I know would not enjoy having geckos hatch in their clothes. I love it. I think it’s amazing that, regardless of all the things humans do to keep our species separate from everything else in the animal kingdom, the animal kingdom still sticks up its middle finger to us and finds a way in. I don’t like getting bitten or stung, but I also don’t begrudge other life from sharing this spinning blue and green ball with me. I say “Good morning” to my resident jumping spider. I usher ants, crickets and scorpions out of the way. People look at me as though there’s something wrong with me for doing these things. Why?

Perhaps it is exactly this question that has kept me from writing. Why? Why do we not love all things, big and small? Why do we discriminate against the creatures we don’t find appealing (for whatever reason, whether it’s their scales, their multiple legs, their ability to eat holes through our bags of flour, etc)? Who are we to choose what’s worth saving and what isn’t? What’s important and what isn’t? Are humans simply that shallow? “Why” is a very uncomfortable question for a lot of people in this world.

Usually when I ask why, I receive anger. I receive vitriol. How dare I ask something that begs someone to think! To answer for their behaviour! To answer, period! Well, why not? People seem to have no problem demanding that of me. Why can’t I ask the questions?

So, with this in mind, I will have to find a way to keep writing. Because someone has to ask. Someone has to wonder. I hope you will wonder with me.

my incessantly pecking friend

in an octopus’ garden

World upside down

 

All rights reserved. ©2014 Jennifer Vitanzo

Images from Varying States of Work in the South African Bush, or Yes, I Really Do Live in South Africa

I know; this is big. Two posts in one week. The world must be ending. So since I couldn’t include a picture with my last post, I thought I’d compile some silly pictures of me doing what I do best in the middle of the wilds of South Africa – which is look like an idiot. Between showering outside fully clothed because it was the only clean water available, and shoveling cheetah poo when the cats were focused on their morning meal, I certainly haven’t lacked in the ‘glamourous’ side of life out here. This post is specifically for the people convinced I don’t actually live in South Africa, and that what I really do is imagine these situations, cull images from the Internet that fit my tall tales and post it all as my own adventure, hoping no one ever notices. Well, though I prefer to keep pictures of myself to a minimum when there are much better things to look at here, I thought maybe it was time I revealed a little bit more of me to you. Which doesn’t sound right. Anyway, here is a gallery of me in various locations and doing various tasks. These are all family-friendly photos, I promise. There was also a video of me feeding goslings (no, not Ryan, sadly), but the file was too big and reducing it is currently well beyond my technological capacity and Internet bandwidth. Maybe someday you’ll get to see me doing my best Mother Goose impression. But I wouldn’t hold my breath if I were you.

Feeling very small

Getting in deep

Inspecting my aim

Checking out my accuracy

Bush shower

Looking for signs of life

Still looking for a signal

Putting together the car, piece by piece

Saying goodbye to a released black rhino

Becoming one of the pack

Cheetah taste-test

Two-day-old baby rabbit

cheetah joining me for breakfast

 

All rights reserved. ©2014 Jennifer Vitanzo

South African Adventure – Finding Home

Jersey Shore ghosts of the past

Okay, so today’s post is NOT about wildlife.   It’s personal.   I know, not my style, but whatev.  Life without change and chaos is boring.

General consensus from several sources give the definition of ‘homesick’ as acutely longing for one’s family or home.  ‘Nostalgic’ seems to be the reality-immune bedfellow of homesick, as in you get nostalgic for ‘home’ and ‘home’ is this mythical wonderland that exists in your mind until you actually return to that place in person and realize it was all a very elaborate hoax by your mind to prevent you from ever finding peace and contentment anywhere else.   One of the ultimate ironies and frustrations in life is that the more places you live, the less you are able to actually define and find ‘home,’ and the less you ever feel at home anywhere.  With the arrival of each new place, new memories are created, new histories and stories to add to the stockpile of data from which to draw a picture of this mythical ‘home,’ yet the quilt you sew is too disparate as to have any unifying element aside from your presence in those memories.  Your friends from when you lived in Thailand will probably never meet your childhood friends (who also might not even know each other), or your friends from living in Canada.  Your spheres don’t mesh; they overlap slightly here and there, just enough to make you think there is a thread you can hang on to, but not enough thread to build a thick enough rope to tie you to one place and one place alone.  The more you change your surroundings, in fact, the less you are ever able to find yourself settled anywhere, perhaps owing to the ‘grass is always greener’ mindset that plagues humanity.  Or perhaps it is just that while we can believe that home is a theoretical term for a place that only exists within us, we nonetheless search all our lives for it in external sources.  Such thinking has done nothing less than to cause wars.

I used to think that the place where I grew up was ‘home,’ even though I went as far away from there as possible, as soon as possible.  I used to have this hazy image, like an old photograph, of what that place looked like, and memories would play through my head like old home movies full of Instagram-like unnatural color, light, and sound.  What I remembered was only a flutter of the reality, but I held to that flawed image, determined to keep my idealized childhood intact.  All the bad disappeared into my fantasy reproduction of the reality, with Dorothy whispering in my ear that there’s no place like home.  The ‘inadequacy’ of the homes every place I’ve ever lived since living there stems from that imaginary mental cloud.   No matter how I try, I cannot erase it, nor can I seem to push past it, and as such, I’ve since always felt emotionally and psychologically homeless, even when I return there.   Once in a while I go someplace where I forget for short period of time, but they invariably come back, and in certain times nothing I do can push those images from once again bubbling up and taking over.  Yet every time I return there, I can’t help but feel lost, out of place and unable to find common ground with the place I grew up.  My politics, my worldview, my experiences are so vastly different from the people I knew growing up, including my family, and though we can talk about things and share our stories, I find myself unable to identify with that world anymore.  I find myself feeling utterly alone in the one place I should theoretically feel comfortable and at home.

I started feeling ‘homesick’ again a few weeks ago when I realized that for the first time in my life, I would not be back on US soil at all in 2012.  Not even to pass through on my way to somewhere else.  For whatever reason, that struck a somber chord with me, prompting all these lonely, sad feelings to well up from who knows where.  This ‘homesick’ feeling took a turn for the worse when Hurricane Sandy showed up and decimated the area where I grew up.  Photos showing the collection of destroyed beaches, roads, boardwalks and towns where I spent my childhood drove home this feeling that no matter where I go and what I do, my fictionalized and romanticized ‘home’ will never even be the image I had in my mind of it, because that image has now been wiped out by the Atlantic Ocean.  So here I am, 10,000 miles and a more than a few years away from my childhood, and the one place in the world, for better or for worse, that I could always call home is essentially gone.  Yes, NJ is still on the map, but the boundaries, all the lines and roads and dimensions I remember are now redrawn, and some are gone altogether.  It feels like nothing less than having your childhood erased.

Where does that leave me, now?  South Africa is not home.  Though I’ve gotten used to the new world in which I live, it will never be home to me, because for me, home is being settled, being accepted, and accepting a place for what it is.  Here I am told that even if I am the best driver in the world, I will not pass my driver’s test unless I bribe someone.  Same goes for getting a marriage license and many other legal documents.  I can’t accept that.  In addition, this is a place that continues to tell me, through various manners, that my heritage and I aren’t wanted here.  Many, in fact most, people I’ve met here have told me they hate America and Americans, even though they’ve never been to the US and don’t actually know any Americans themselves.  Yet they never seem to see the irony of that or the fact that almost all of the movies, music, products they consume (and often illegally consume) come from that ‘hateful’ land and those ‘hateful’ people, as does a considerable amount of the world’s crisis aid.  And I – and several other American expats I know have also experienced this – have found that many of the people here have been significantly less accepting of and friendly to ‘outsiders’ than their counterparts Stateside.  Even my South African fiancé has said as much, cursing his homeland often because of this, because of the blatant and inherent corruption alive and well here, and because of the overall inefficiency that seems to be a hallmark of this continent overall.  As much as I try to accept that, I can’t, nor can I change it.  Trust me, I’ve tried.  I’ve had a lot of people who agreed with me, but none willing to do anything about it.  So no matter how much I can love this land, it will never be my home.

Funny how much more you identify with the place from which you come when you aren’t there.  I am Jersey, born and bred, like it or not.  I can live in the bush until I die, but I will always be Jersey.  And you know what?  I’m pretty damn proud of that and of my little home state.  I’ve seen countless acts of kindness, compassion and understanding from my fellow Jerseyans come out of Sandy’s destruction.   I’ve watched complete strangers work together to help people whose lives have been irreparably changed.  And I’ve been sad that I couldn’t be there to work alongside them and help rebuild.  My heart longs to walk those roads again, to ride those amusement park rides, to share Italian ice with friends on the beach, even though I know it is impossible.  But none of this changes the fact that it is no longer home.  Nowhere, it seems, is these days.  And that is a feeling I have to learn to accept, or I condemn myself to a life of continually driving myself to find something that doesn’t really exist anywhere outside my mind.

Song of the day: Many come to mind, but at the moment, ‘Home’ by Michael Buble hits the spot.

Beaches closed, end of the season

Jersey Shore ghosts of the past

The calm before the storm

 

All rights reserved. ©2012 Jennifer Vitanzo