This past weekend, we planted our spring vegetable garden. It’s a fun activity to do with the kids. It’s one of those things that you hope teaches them something beyond just the surface level of digging holes, putting plants in them, watering, etc. Indeed, tending a vegetable garden is ripe (pun intended) with potential lessons about life, growth, and death, responsibility and caring for things, and fostering a connection with nature and the food we eat. This spring planting has me reminiscing about our last growing season. For which I will provide a brief recap.

Speaking of birthdays, numbers have a way of creeping up on us. Friday, April 3, was my father’s birthday; born in 1925, he would have been 101. Born and raised in North Carolina, he met my mother at Duke University. He graduated with a degree in civil engineering in just three years after enlisting in the Navy’s accelerated commissioned officers program during WWII. He served as a captain of a converted PT boat assigned to rescue downed pilots in the Pacific Theater.

Having grown up along the Gulf Coast, I have early impressions of the communities that make up the Scenic 98 Coastal area. Mobile was home, but fishing trips with my family out of Dauphin Island were a weekly occurrence in warm weather. We logged many days at my cousins’ summer home on the Little Lagoon down Ft. Morgan road, and spent time on Cotton Bayou with friends in Orange Beach. Eventually, my folks bought a home in Pt. Clear where we spent summers from Memorial Day through Labor Day.

This year’s Labor Day weekend was also the twentieth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. The almost 1400 lives that were lost, reduced from the original 1800 estimated in Mississippi and Louisiana, are a reminder that Mother Nature is undefeatable. Realizing that Labor Day is in the middle of prime storm season, it is hard not to recall the hurricanes that have been part of my life since childhood.

If you’ve ever attended a civic function on the Eastern Shore, you’ve probably run into Skip Jones. He may be the most civic-minded man I know. His interests run wide and deep. He is also an ‘Old Salt’, an endearing term for someone who knows their way around the waterfront.‍

When we started this venture called Scenic98Coastal.com, I talked it out with lots of people I know and respect. The best advice I received was from a friend’s son visiting Fairhope from New York during the pandemic. We were having lunch at Sunset Pointe at Fly Creek when I told him about our idea to launch a newsletter for the area between Mobile and Pensacola. 

For the first half of my life, I was Jim, and then, increasingly, I was Jimmy Lee. It's a nickname I gave myself in 1993, and I encouraged it to stick. It's been confusing at times, but looking back, I wouldn't change a thing.

Something that even some of my friends don't know about me is I'm into birds, and have been for over 30 years. The preferred term is "birding" for people who are seriously into it, but I've never quite put myself in that category, even though I do own a handful of reference books, some nice binoculars and even a high-powered spotting scope.