Member-only story
The Beautiful Story
Ladybug: A Boat Captain’s Widow
Press enter or click to view image in full size
Photo by Nataliya Melnychuk on Unsplash
I think of the Florida Gulf coast in this hurricane season. Growing up, it meant everything to me to learn how to fish in the Panhandle during the summer and sell crabs on the roadside in Destin. “Ladybug’s” passion for the sea and its creatures are modeled loosely on experiences I had with my aunt.
Her chair is a basket weave of rainbow, her floppy hat a mushroom cap. Every day she sits under the Australian pine, her legs stretched out toward the bay, heels dug into the soft sands of Anna Maria Island.
She speaks to birds. She tells them where to find mollusks, greenies, pinfish, tube worms, anemones, mullet, stonecrab, blue crab, fiddlers, spot, black drum, croakers, ballyhoo. The longer-legged wading birds walk along the shallow areas, knobby knees clear of the water for more than a hundred feet out. They are her friends: the common egret, the snowy egret, the white ibis, the roseate spoonbill, the great blue heron. When one of the larger birds is near, she speaks in soft tones. She embraces their world through her sympathy.
Sometimes she helps a grounded boat. She walks out on the bar and dislodges sand from the propeller. She gives the careless boaters…
