Susan L Feathers – Susan Feathers

Dedicated to Jimmy Buffet and Parrotheads Everywhere

Margaritaville Hotel – Photo by Susan Feathers

On Pensacola Beach on Santa Rosa Island in Florida, Jimmy Buffet bought a half-completed hotel in 2010. After the Deep Water Horizon Oil Spill, tourism – the region’s main economy – went into a tailspin. Purchasing the hotel was Buffet’s gift of support to people of the Florida Panhandle he loved.

Beyond the Margaritaville Hotel lies the Gulf Islands National Seashore—seven miles of white sand beaches, swaying golden sea oats and translucent-green ocean. Way out on the tip end is Fort Pickens, one our country’s oldest coastal defense fortifications. The National Seashore is a place where sea turtles return to lay their eggs and sea birds migrate to raise their young, and where schools of fish, spotted eagle rays, and pods of dolphins hunt, mate, and play. People swim and snorkel in the warm gentle waves and sunbathe on white sand made of quartz crystals carried by rivers from the Appalachian Mountains into the Gulf.

Still other beach goers wear feathers and strut around on long, skinny legs, or beat the waves with a broad tail. Some soar above or dive into the waves for lunch or dinner. Beyond Margaritaville people, animals, beach and ocean all live and play together.

These are some of their stories. Some are for kids and all are for the “kid in you.” Read them together or alone to learn more about the lives of the people and animals that live in one of Earth’s most beautiful places. When you know about it, you’ll want to keep it for all to come.

[These stories are protected under U.S. Copyright Law. Read but seek permission to print. Contact me: susanleefeathers@gmail.com.]

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Kentucky is a land of dozens of tribal nations. Once densely populated with virgin forests, the people cleared some of these wooded areas to create meadowlands. Game inhabited these areas to graze on the wild grasses. Good hunting. The people kept the meadows productive with a light firing each season, creating the meadows seen today, a gentle impression on the land. See Native Americans of Clay County and Kentucky pdf below.

When I walk around the countryside in Southcentral Kentucky, I am aware of trees and farms and rivers and lakes and sandstone or limestone outcrops–a porous land on and through which waters flow. Karst landscape it is called. Carved by water, there are caverns, caves and blue holes where springs surface like eyes peering up at us terrestrial beings.

I am writing a new novel based in Kentucky in Bowling Green. The frame of the novel is the land. Its presence permeates the story about a young girl whose family has deep roots in the land, five generations of farming on what was indigenous land. She is a new generation with dreams in her eyes about regenerating her family’s land, back to what it might have been when reciprocity between human and soil was natural and both thrived.

She wonders, “What would reparations look like? What could I do to make it right?” See the PDF below about how many tribal nations originally inhabited the land on which the hunted and lived for thousands of years.

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