Daily Cascade

The View Across

Write about what you see out the window today. Give us enough details it feels like we're looking out the window with you.

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Exactly from where I am sitting now, on my computer chair, I can see the outside, since I face the large window at the wall across. Out there, the golf course is like a painted landscape. Two golf carts stand side by side by the seventh hole. While four people are watching like a hawk the golfer whose turn it is to putt, the golfer takes his time and possibly gives his full attention to his possible aim. Yet, I can't see any of his facial expressions. This seventh hole is too far from the house. Even those golfers are just tiny figures from here, but their stances and arm and head gestures tell stories.

Then, closer to the house, a flock of white ibises sweep down on the freshly mown grass, indifferent only to the "golfers only" status of the green. The ground is sort of wavy and hilly, unlike the more flattened golf courses I knew when we lived up north. Such undulations of the ground can turn a simple putt into a humbling experience, as it is doing right now. Funny isn't it that here in Florida, where most surfaces are flattened, we'd end up watching a wavy ground for a golf course!

Although these grounds and this scene is sculpted, maintained, and manicured into an idealized version for the golfers' eyes, nature here always butts in, like those flocks of birds, a small rabbit, or a hawk sweeping down on a tiny squirrel.

In this golf course's case, for years, it was the property of Club Med. Then, it was sold to our town. Our town being so astute(!) put up huge trees here and there, despite their hurricane hazard to our surrounding houses around the course. Their aim and reason for those trees was to attract tourist golfers from North, although the trees are not South Florida trees but belong originally to the more northern regions. Then, a few years ago, lightning hit one of those huge trees, taking off some of its trunk and bark.

Now, from here, I can also see that maimed tree with its barkless side and its slanted form, still alive. This may be because the ground crew takes good care of everything. Right this minute, since it is Saturday today, there are now several more golfers on the green, their sizes seem to be two inches or so from where I am sitting, and I hope, the bright sunshine shimmering on the dark green lawn brings luck to their swings and putts.