EXCERPT: FOLLOWING the STRANDLINE [Book #2 in the Strandline Series]

FOLLOWING THE STRANDLINE:  CHAPTER ONE, EXCERPT

"Here was a scene from a tourist brochure. 

Come see Florida’s glorious freshwater springs. Wish you were here.

Remember advertisements, Roy Terry thought, biting back a laugh, scratching the end of his nose.

They were beautiful together, the girl with her mop of honey-gold curls and the young man dark haired and stern. The guy turned his back to the girl when she kicked off her jeans, keeping his eyes on the hedge of blackberry thorns that grew along the edge of the sand. Rifle in hand, he scanned and watched. Young but not foolish. Attracted to each other but not brainless about it. Survivors."

To Conserve and Protect

Liberal arts colleges run to liberal politics and those that embrace liberal ideas. That’s just how it is. When I comment on the phenomenon to my engineer friends, they snort and then scoff. Sometimes they use their words, but that’s not one hundred percent of the time. 

When they do comment, they often say things like, “What did you think, you were studying ‘the hard sciences?’” 

Then they solve for “y.” 

What are hard sciences anyway? Science that is solid like cement? Or is it just a lot of math disguised as fun experiments?

I am a writer. No, strike that. I am an author. No, that’s not quite right either. 

I am a novelist first, then a blogger, then a smart mouth with a lot to say in a soft sciences discipline. 

I am also conservative by today’s liberal art’s standards.

I know that making this admission is tantamount to stripping naked in public and NOT having a Chinese word tattooed on the small of my back—but it is what it is. I also know that I run the risk of being dismissed for the sin of . . . being . . . staid. 

Staid is a word that means tattoo free—also boring.

During one of my college classes we were regaled with the lively tale of our soon-to-be-retired professor’s adventures of smoking pot in an RV during the wild, cool, hippy years of her youth. Everyone laughed. Her hipness had been established. The point made: cool people get stoned, drunk, and experience all of life’s wild, hallucinogenic drama, so they’ll have good stories to tell the other villagers before complaining about drama monsters. 

Staid people remember growing up in a house with a cool parent.

It’s hard to fool me when it comes to the consequences of certain wild, untamed, screw the Ten Commandments behavior. No, strike that. It’s impossible to fool me.

Full disclosure: I have an agenda. I am the grandmother to fourteen [in May] . . . that’s children . . . not hamsters or pot belly pigs. I’d eat a hamster if I got hungry enough, just like they do in South America, but I digress.

I will have fourteen grandchildren and teaching them the right way to live and be happy is part of my job description. It’s a village thing. Sending messages to the young and impressionable that living stoned or drunk in someone’s garage and racing around on a giant human hamster wheel on the Internet is ‘living’ are right out. Can’t risk it. I have a pretty big garage and a barn with a hayloft. My agenda is that cool can get you crabs and staid pays off in the end. 

Hard work, personal responsibility, and being honest with your fellow villagers are the messages around here. It ain’t flashy or hip, but it keeps the baby villagers from having to worry that the Daddy villagers will drive the family station wagon into a gator lake—again.

Fuller disclosure: Smoke, dope, screw, and live a life of fluctuating, sand shifting relative values all you want. It’s your life, but please don’t think that you’re going to live in my hayloft like a giant human hamster when the power goes out.

Liberalism is about change.

Change is dramatic.

Drama is exciting.

Drama is also expensive and exhausting and everyone says that they’ve had enough of it.

Linda (Straight Shot) Zern 

Eclectic Boho Gypsy Style

Screw neutral. Let’s paint the walls gold and hang giant school maps from the 1950’s on them, and then let’s call it the eclectic boho gypsy decorating style.

My family mocks me, for my bold use of the color yellow, my relentless devotion to butterflies, and my nutty love of big maps. Tough. Decorating should reflect the inner spirit of those that live in a house. My inner spirit is a giant yellow butterfly in the shape of Greenland.

I don’t rent my house. My walls belong to me—mostly. So I hang things on the walls that make me happy: hats, maps, nests, teeth, bones, baskets, skulls, quotes, words, and a Maori dance skirt. I do not use colors of paint that can be described without an explanation point. And books. Books everywhere.

I wouldn’t even know what the words eclectic, boho, or gypsy meant if it wasn’t for books. Thanks books. 

My children are at an age when they are making children. Those children then grow and fill up the houses they live in, causing the buying and selling those homes. Their tales of having to turn their houses into neutral tan, non-threatening palettes of blah for potential buyers makes me sad. I understand the theory. Tan goes with everything—and is therefore neutral. Tan makes people think they won’t have to paint just yet. Tan is non-threatening. 

Tan is the underside of a leach—a neutral, non-threatening leach. For some reason people are comforted by that when they buy a house.

Buying and selling is not as much fun as being a wall hoarder, which is what my daughter’s husband calls her. She likes to hang picture frames on the wall full of old ballet toe shoes and mod podge . . . everything. 

Hey! That’s not wall hoarding; that’s her own kind of beautiful.

It’s nice when the buying and selling is over and the living begins: even if your decorating style resembles the inside of a tambourine tied with gypsy scarves.

Linda (Butterfly High) Zern