Lake Sybelia

No One Chooses

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September 15, 2010

Nearly a decade ago, a sudden medical problem made me afraid I was going to die on the spot. What had I done to deserve the infamy of croaking in Costco?

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Snow Days

December 30, 2008

No one is happier about Portland’s record December snowfall finally melting than our Irvington neighborhood Gnome. There was more than enough white stuff to fill his tree-trunk abode, so I’m assuming people kept his doorway sufficiently cleared so he could maintain his perpetual southeasterly gaze from our block.

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Time capsule of what?

October 8, 2008

I’ve made it halfway through a movie that uses my childhood home on a Central Florida lake as a main setting. One of my brother’s bought the DVD after I learned of the film and wrote about it. So far it’s like glancing around a museum I visited a long time ago, a familiar building […]

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Decades Later, an Answer

September 6, 2008

It took more than a half-century, but I finally learned why we ended up living on a lake in Central Florida during my childhood. Not one house but three as we moved clockwise around Lake Sybelia in Maitland from the late 1950s to 1970.

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Dogs back in the picture

August 3, 2008

Two dogs and water. Enough to bring to mind my dogs, not in a Portland fountain but following me forever ago as I race off a boathouse roof. A kid leaping toward a Florida lake below, the dogs airborne too.

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Fish feast of memory

July 30, 2008

The media feeding frenzy over tiny carp performing pedicures strikes me as gluttonous as the fish themselves. Then again the story’s a talker, an offbeat news morsel. (How many bad food puns can I stuff in these sentences?) At the gym today, I couldn’t escape the story. It beamed from two TV screens. But I […]

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Pirate of memories

July 14, 2008

I’m stealing a memory. It belongs to my youngest brother. The memory is about Gertrude, a row boat that Bill found submerged in our lake in Florida when we were kids. He and a friend somehow hauled her to shore, patched a hole in the bottom, and retrofitted her into a floating fort.

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Summer stars greet the sun today — freshly opened blossoms in my Portland teardrop pond. I’ll wade in and reward my babies with fertilizer pellets. But I’ll be tempted to disappear beneath the lily pads into my past.

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Looking for home

May 31, 2008

How strange to stumble upon photos of my childhood house of the 1960s on a movie web site. I was searching Google images for a picture of Lake Sybelia in Maitland, Florida. Once a quaint hamlet of citrus trees and lakes, Maitland was long ago consumed by the tourist monster that ate Orlando. During my […]

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