Excerpt from Playing Botticelli by Liza Nelson, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Not that people hadn't stood there before, but no one who counted. Only a typical Florida land developer with King Midas dreams. Back in the fifties, he had cleared half the Point and built pastel bungalows to sell to rich retirees from Miami looking for a retreat from the sweltering heat of south Florida. Point Paradise was his name for the place and he gave each house its own title burnt into the lintel above the front door. Pelican's Landing, Hibiscus Haven. I've always liked him for those names.

Then Hurricane Margaret-Ann hit, the same week his ad campaign was scheduled to run, the same week his workmen were under rush orders to finish installing the pink and aqua kitchens; the same week it so happens that my grandparents took me to Madison Square Garden in New York City to see a rodeo with Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, my heroes I'm not ashamed to admit. Shaking hands with Roy and Dale counted as the peak experience of my six-year-old life. When we came outside afterward, the skies had darkened to an ashy charcoal gray the color of the sleeve of my grandfather's overcoat as he worked desperately to flag down a taxi cab. My first conscious sensory memory is the danger I could smell in the air, metallic and electric, smokey and moist.

My misguided get-rich-quick-now-bankrupt developer disappeared. I can see him, a small bald man who sweats through his linen suits, driving by his ruins one last time, his wife beside him, chipping off her nail polish and chewing her lip as they head north in a long-finned Cadillac whose back end sags under the weight of their hastily gathered possessions, the trunk's mouth roped down into a half open grin.

Eight of the ten cottages had been flattened by the storm and never touched since. I used most of what was left out of my traveler's checks-over half of my inheritance from Daddy-to pay cash for the twenty acres plus. God, it seems like so much land for so little money, but back then I was considered insanely fiscally brazen. Fiscally brazen, it sounds almost as bad as sexually promiscuous, which I was obviously considered by certain family members as well.

Rot and hibiscus overran the place. Even Paradise, the cottage most inland and least damaged, was falling in on itself by the time I moved into it with Dylan. I stripped the cottage down to its skeleton and rebuilt. The folks at Ace Hardware and Henry's Building Supplies were standoffish at first, as you can well imagine: Esmeralda, Florida, circa 1976: woman stranger who looks more than a little like a hippie coming around asking questions and buying supplies with traveler's checks written on a Hartford, Connecticut, bank while her little girl hangs on her leg and refuses to smile or take even one piece of Chicklets gum. The raised eyebrows I saw the first afternoon Dylan and I walked in stayed raised for months, but eventually the guys got used to me. And I even got used to them, overalls, chewing tobacco, ma'ams and all.

I did my own plumbing and pretty much all my own electrical. It was a learning experience, that's for sure. There is not one inch of surface, not a beam, not a nail hole, that I have not touched. Four rooms and a bath, that's all we needed- plus my studio in the old toolshed-filled with serenity and order amid the chaotic beauty of the land. Point Paradise. The embodiment of my, Dylan's and my, essential spirit.

And believe me, rebuilding Paradise was a spiritual act. I've been a studio potter, a weaver, a painter, even a glassblower. God, I had loved working the glory hole, but once I had Dylan I gave up my plans to go back. It was not a place to have a toddler crawling around. And I can't say I ever had what I could call a sense of purpose until I worked on my house. Fishing wires through the walls, framing doors, smoothing Sheetrock plaster, I discovered the energy of space and time within the set boundaries of a ten-by-twelve-foot room. The quality of space. How life can expand within an imposed, purely spatial structure. It all goes back to vision.

From Play Botticelli, Liza Nelson. (c) December 1999, Liza Nelson used by permission.