I grew up in a city called Corpus Christi, in south Texas—more precisely, a part of that city called Flour Bluff. The area is hot and humid, a coastal plain on the Gulf of Mexico, with diverse marine life and waterfowl. It has blossoming yuccas and gnarled mesquite trees, salty winds and sneaky laughing gulls. I grew up watching osprey and great blue herons, cattle egrets, chaparral, and caracara, dart, snatch, dive, and glide. Every year enormous Sandhill cranes winter near my parents’ house, rising in flight at dawn with percussive calls that ring out across the brackish water. That is what I miss the most about the place where I grew up, the sound of so many cranes each dawn and dusk. A sound and a color, but also a sense of salt and the thickness of air.
