In yesterday's post, I mentioned my wife and I taking a nice Sunday drive this past Sunday. We went to the beach for a while (see the pic I posted yesterday too) and before we left, we sat for a little longer on a park bench above the beach near our car. Just to prolong the ocean experience, you understand.
We were mostly just soaking up the sun and the beauty of the day and the water when right in front of us a generic yellow butterfly lifted off from the grass he had been on. We hadn't noticed him sitting there. Like I mentioned, I haven't been out much for several months except to go to work and back. So seeing the butterfly made my heart leap. I know it's really corny.
I have always thought butterflies were cool. The way they fly so jumpy and all over the place. It has made me smile since I was a kid, just because the jerky way they fly and eventually go in the general direction they are going for. But boy does it take a lot of effort. Kinda like my life, you know?
Yellow Butterfly lifts off and starts to struggle to the south directly into the wind. He's really jukin' and jivin' all over the place but slowly, slowly makes his way south. I watch him for a while and then stop watching while talking with my wife.
A minute or two later, I'm looking out at the Atlantic while we talk and...
Zzzoooom. Yellow Butterfly streaks back across 'our' patch of the oceanside park from south to north, this time with the wind, but still in that schitzoid manner, only ten times as fast as he was going upwind. It was like it had changed his mind and started north but had no idea the wind would blow him like that.
I immediately said "WWhaaaa! Help Me!" for him as he went streaking by.
Well. It was funny at the time, and got a laugh out of my wife. And it was a good sign for me that I could think of something funny that fast, too. That my outlook and mind are getting more engaged in the world. Sometimes it's such a small thing that lifts your spirit.
Yellow Butterfly was seriously bookin' it though.
Juan Ponce De Leon Landing Park
The park on the ocean south of Melbourne Beach, Florida that I mentioned above is named after Ponce De Leon of 'Fountain of Youth' fame.
They have some informational boards set up at the park in which they quote articles by scholars on Ponce De Leon. These articles state that over the years some scholars have come to determine from the writings of Ponce De Leon and some of his men, that he actually first landed in Florida at the site where this park was established.
Although Brevard county has nice beaches, we're not exaclty a hot-bed of tourism (a good thing in my opinion) so the county jumped at the chance to honor ol' Juan and claim a little glory for the county by association. Kennedy Space Center is a big tourist draw, but KSC and Cocoa Beach are like forty or fifty miles north of this park. (Brevard county is seventy miles long)
But it's one of my wife and I's favorite places to go sit at the ocean.
And that's cool about Ponce De Leon maybe having landed here. If it's true.
It's our version of 'George Washington slept here'.
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