Tarpon Springs, Florida

Here's Abby smiling away at my parents breezy townhouse in Tarpon Springs, Florida last weekend. Note the bunny on the table just to her right, an object whose presence sent Abby into occasional paroxysms of delight. Known as neither "bunny" or "rabbit" but as the repeated exclamation "Hop! Hop! Hop!" it, along with a soft yellow duck basket, the moon viewed before bedtime and her grandparents held a special allure.

I should also note that Abby has a new song she's been singing this past week. It's the Applesauce Song. I made it up Wednesday afternoon and she was smitten. The girl loves her applesauce. Not surprisingly, improvisatory songs relating to apples are championed. Here are the lyrics:

Apple, apple, apple, applesauce
Apple, apple, apple, applesauce (repeat as needed)

It's more a chant then song, I suppose and Abby sings it as though it were an incantation, its reciting the surest way to conjure up Fuji slices for squeezing in the palms of each hand.

Taking the Woodpecker Seriously, Not Literally

A few weeks back my parents checked out what my Dad referred to as the "Florida Chautauqua" located in the Panhandle and where, for a few days at least, one can pay as little as $7 to attend seminars on "Taking the Bible Seriously But Not Literally," or "Why Can't I Wear Pajamas to the Supermarket? And Other Pressing Questions About Fashion" among others. My parents enjoyed a Victorian Tea session as hosted by Ellen Mayfield and The Tea Ladies and were randomly seated alongside a couple in search of the iconic ivory-billed woodpecker, which, according to a recent National Geographic, was thought by most ornithologists to have been extinct since the 1940s. That is, extinct until the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, based on "seven fleeting glimpses and four seconds of fuzzy video," announced in April of 2005 that they had "confirmed the existence of an ivory-billed woodpecker flitting elusively through the tupelos along a small Arkansas stream called Bayou DeView." That's it. But it's enough, according to the article, and as my parents witnessed in the couple they sipped tea with, to inspire hundreds of ivorybill searchers (often funded by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service) to wallow deep into the birds suitable habitats all through the south in hopes that they too might catch a fleeting glance or, better, a definitive snapshot or video of the illusive little pecker.