Hue, Tint, Tone, Shade - Saturday Snapshots

The ocean is one of my favorite places to be.  It's been years since I set eyes on ocean waves and dug my toes into the sand.  It is one of those places that is always the same yet always changing.  And I love it.

I had forgotten how the ocean's color changes from place to place, from day to day, from morning to night, sometimes from hour to hour.

This time I was struck by how bright and beautiful the water was. Blues from pastel to navy, aquas, turquoises, teals, greens. And near-violet several times, too.  Hues, tints, tones, and shades.

The waves were gentle and the water was warm.

One day was cloudy. (Florida was lightly cloudy compared to Ohio's dense, dark clouds that sometimes necessitate lights on inside during the day to see what we're doing.)

My daughter had the last week of January and the first week of February off  work.  At the beginning of January she suggested, spur of the moment, that we take a little trip somewhere for a few days while she was off.  New York City and Florida were the two locations we discussed, then wavered back and for a week or more.  My older daughter's husband was able to get time off so she could go, too.  And we ended up in Hollywood, Florida, in a hotel that was on the beach.  Glorious sunshine, sand, and ocean!

I would have loved to spend all day every day on the beach but we three had different ideas about what would be the most fun so we compromised and spent time at the ocean and time doing other things.  One of our favorite places was the Anne Kolb Nature Center where we saw a mangrove forest.  Oh so interesting!  Looking into the forest (growing in water) we saw a mass of roots sprouting from the trunk of the trees, some above and reaching for the water, more already deep into the water.  A tangle of roots!  We visited twice:  first in the afternoon, then a few days later just before sunset.  During that last visit we kept hearing snaps, pops, cracks, and squeaks coming from the water where the mangroves were.  We couldn't see anything making the noises, nor any movement in the water.  We learned that the mussels in the water were closing their shells.   

Another day we visited Tree Tops Park in Davie where we saw a banyan tree.  The photos below start with what we saw at eye level, then a little higher, and finally toward the top of the tree.  There was no way to get the whole tree into one photograph.  The diameter of the group of roots was perhaps 40 feet or more, growing in a semi-circle.  I could not tell if the branches were reaching for the ground to put down roots or the stems were growing up.  Beautiful and fascinating.  

It was a joy to spend five days with my daughters enjoying sun, sand, ocean, and nature.

--Nancy.
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