Believe it or not, this is the daylight view from my living room window . . . Sarasota Bay.

We arrived around noon, a fairly expeditious trip, though since we'd been up since 3:30 we felt like we'd been on the road forever. When I stepped through the doors of baggage claim, my skin was shocked by the temperature change: 80 degrees and humid. My lank winter hair instantly began curling, and in the apartment we demonstrated our heat-starved northernness by immediately opening the windows and turning off the air conditioning, apparently a thing that no Floridians ever do.

Yesterday was mostly business: getting everyone from the airport, dealing with car rental and grocery shopping. Today we'll go to work. Exactly what that will mean I don't know, except that I think we need to get poems into the air.

I feel like I'm in an alien world. Florida is not a place I can easily imagine myself, even when I'm here. I look across this bay, ringed with highways and high-rises, and wonder what such an expanse would have been before Europeans arrived.  This is where Cabeza de Vaca set foot on North American soil. There is no silence now.