My high school class held its 20-year reunion a few weeks ago. I was on our cruise to Alaska, so I missed getting together with my former classmates in Florida. However, the reunion inspired many of us to reconnect via Facebook and other online tools, and we've been having a great time filling one another in on the details of our lives.
One classmate has shared her worries about her daughter's illness and an upcoming surgery. Many classmates have shared stories and photos from recent pregnancies, or parenting advice, or both. My best friend and an old boyfriend have both shared photos of their adopted daughters, one from Russia and one from China.
And today, I received in the mail a copy of another close friend's second published volume of poetry. Raymond McDaniel won the National Poetry Series a few years ago and published Murder (a violet); his latest book is Saltwater Empire, a book of poems about the deep South (including recent ones about the hurricane-scarred Gulf Coast). Here are a few for this hot summer day. If you close your eyes after reading them, I am sure you can imagine the Spanish moss in the trees and the heat shimmering on the St. Johns River (ask any North Florida schoolkid and you'll hear that the St. Johns and the Nile are the only two rivers in the world that flow north...whether that's entirely true doesn't matter to us).
Here's my blog post about another high school friend, Omid Safi, last summer. I have such amazingly cool pals!
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