Nanu del Cielo was born in 1957 in South Tropical Trail, a neighbourhood on Merritt Island, in Central Florida. Her childhood home faced the Indian River Lagoon near Cape Canaveral. On weekends, her father (and a number of neighbours) set up ‘honour’ fruit stands scattered down South Tropical Trail and sold their homegrown fruit.

Mangoes with green skins that blushed orange into red

Pink lychees.

Pink dragon fruit.

Musky-brown longans.

Del Cielo is known for her short stories, like ‘The Shallow End’, ‘Intertwined’ and ‘Permanent Tenderness’, and her novella, The Earth Is Like a Girl, which was published after her death. ‘The Shallow End’ appeared in The Paris Review in 1975, when she was only eighteen – giving rise to comparisons with Françoise Sagan. More fruitful might be to compare del Celio to Clarice Lispector. Both were wild writers. Nevertheless, just as Clarice writes in Lispector – Nanu writes in del Cielo. In the words of Hélène Cixous, ‘Every writer writes rigorously in her own language.’ (1)

For Is a River Alive? (2) – Robert Macfarlane turns to Woolf’s ‘little language’ (3) to speak of the climate crisis – unapologetically anthropomorphising rivers as ‘kin’, with an ear to Ursula K. Le Guin. Through the voice of the river – Macfarlane attunes. Macfarlane atones. Macfarlane shakes our body with touching feeling. (4)

Inspired by MacFarlane, I, too, have turned to Woolf’s ‘little language’ in writing about the Floridian world of the young life of the writer Nanu de Cielo: hydrological, colourful, epiphytic, wild.

For me, the pronoun ‘I’ is a little language – a sound for the moon – for love – for death.

‘I’ is a pronoun / sound.

‘I’ is a mirror, a promiscuous mirror, reflecting whoever happens to be using it at any given time. If no one is there, the mirror is as empty as ‘I’. (6)

‘I’ is empty death at its fullest.

‘I’ dreams promiscuously – like a mirror, with endless referents. Morpheus is always changing – he may be the god of sleep, but materially he is like water, ‘writ in water’, (7) which freezes, melts, evaporates, stinks, grows algae, becomes a cloud, grows a tear.  

‘I’ is Morpheus drunk on the poetics water.

‘I’ is an unmoored boat for dreaming.

‘I’ sails alone under shut eyelids, dreaming light into night. (8)

‘I’ is a dream made of light: pictures playing out in the camera obscura of the brain.

‘Light is like water’, you press the button, flip the switch and out it comes, like turning on the taps. (9)

Forget what you think you know. Listen, if you can, to my ‘little language’, written in water by an ‘I’ that grew up with Nanu del Cielo on South Tropical Trail.

We swam with manatees in Blue Spring Park in Volusia. A haven for the mammals in the middle of water-filled Florida.

We begged their whiskered faces for unshaven kiss­es, like suitors playing courtly love.

We checked their pectoral fins for hidden teats, like greedy manatee calves.

We looked into their tiny human-like eyes, avoiding the white scars on their backs caused by violent encounters with boat propellors and keels.

Surging from a spring­ – far far far below the water’s surface – the crystal clear, blue-green liquid (with the shine and surprise of peacock feathers) made an enchanting, magnificently large swimming pool made for us by Nture.

Our fountain of youth.

On this chilly December morning, we are the only swimmers in the warm pool fed by Florida’s aquifer.

Sea-biscuit and coral fossils from 55 to 35 million years ago, when Florida was submerged beneath warm tropical seas, are drawn in the limestone walls of the spring. The blend of rainwater and ancient seawater gives the water an unpleasant taste of sodium chloride. (Was the bitterness, so tiny and powerful on the tip of our tongues, a warning?)

Floating and swimming, we gently bopped, pirouetted, swayed, turned, somersaulted in the 72-degree-eternal-maternal water. Dance was our first art form – initially practiced in the wombs of our mothers.

Our bodies remembered.

Our slow-moving dance partners, despite their sweet plush-toy appearance, are all muscle: hardly any fat to keep them warm – they cannot take the cold.

The manatees depend on the never-changing 72-degree temperature – no matter the season or time of day.

When the tea-coloured water of the St. Johns River dips below 68 degrees, our manatees head for Volusia Blue Spring: any colder could cause fatal hypothermia. 

When resting, a manatee can stay submerged for up to twenty minutes, using her powerful lungs, which are nearly as long as her body.

An underwater outer space.

We felt free. But not as free as the manatee. Why is the manatee so free? Because it is a living mystery that doesn’t wonder about itself.

Manatees are ancient ancestors of the elephant. You can see this in their elephanty, vestigial fingernails on their flippers – their expansive grey size. Average adult manatees weigh 1,000 lbs. and are about ten feet long. The big ones can reach over 2,500 pounds. Manatee DNA holds the secrets of prehistoric animals moving from sea to land. When grabbing gobs of vegetation, their upper lip works like the trunk of an elephant.

All around us primordial vines and trees were drenched with the mystery of Spanish moss.

We went to school with children of astronauts. Our teacher told us that Earthrise, the photograph taken in lunar orbit by astronaut William Anders was ‘the most influential environmental photograph ever taken’. When we stared at that photograph, Nanu and I saw our planet, ourselves, slipping away. The fragility of it all. 

We were in awe of The Blue Marble, taken by the astronauts of Apollo 17, but we were not consoled. Blue eternity. Blue loss.

Even as young girls, we knew things were not right. We tucked this thought away as best as we could in the pockets of our mind, along with fears of nuclear war and air pollution and pesticides on our oranges. We feared for the manatees. The things to come we do not yet know, but may have sensed: big algae blooms; man-caused red tides; loss of sea grass; manatees dying from starvation.

That day, that beautiful day, we saw many bubbles on the water’s surface – signs of happy, gassy manatees.

Nanu and I. We were one. One-self. One little earth. I = 1.

I was nine and so was Nanu when she transferred, one early morning in late August, to Alta Vista, our elementary school. I had never experienced anything like her.

Her long black hair was curly and loose. Very thick. Wild with a mind of its own. Her white sailor dress, with navy-blue trim, caught my eye. Fashion from another time. On the back of the sailor-collar flap were two navy stars and a small moss-green grass stain.

Only Nanu could see the tree’s mast, boom, bow, rudder, hull, keel. It was a very stable boat.

Her school-girl knees were scabbed and scratched from falls she had already forgotten.  In her hair, a pair of pale-pink plastic leaping-deer barrettes, one on each side. So gorgeous against her dark hair.

Even as a child, Nanu’s sartorial ego was formed.

In class that morning, Nanu had been quiet and still.

I coveted the silver ring on Nanu’s left index finger. A snake, coiling around and around and around. Its eyes were surprising: two pale, but intense, blue-green gemstones. On the back side of the ring, a Band-Aid was wrapped around the band to keep the too-large snake ring from slipping off. She would wear that ring forever – her father gave it to her. She would grow into it.

At the start of our long recess at 10:20 a.m., Nanu rocketed herself half-way up the 125-year-old Southern live oak. I stood in the shade of this gigantic tree. I wanted a good look. From high in the tree, she looked down at me: intensely staring into my eyes, straddling a thick high branch with her school-girl thighs.

We could smell the lagoon, where freshwater from the river meets salt water from the ocean: together the two make a warm, brackish, shallow, very fecund friendship.  

The air was hot, humid and very still. The smell sulphury, yet fresh. Not mephitic.

A nine-banded glistening armadillo – rose flecked, head down, tail down, usually nocturnal – a puny cousin of the gigantic, extinct carapace, two-ton glyptodont­ – was sniffing its way along the school’s chain-link fence – but I was only interested in Nanu.

High in the sky a flock of giant sandhill cranes, also known as ‘whooping cranes’, circled the thermals. Their impossibly long necks – stretching, stretching, stretching. Their lengthy windpipes rattling the sky. Bugle. Trumpet. Purr. Trill. Their startling crimson-red bald patches atop palm-size featherless heads were invisible from my view.

Sounds on the timpani of the ear, echoes in the abysm of the mind, vibrate the body in some strange way.

Their calls made me want to climb Nanu­­ – unwind every one of her rings. Untuck my wings – fly in and out of her. Kiss her all over. Tender, wild Nanu. Giver her wings. Take her through the air to the Indian River Lagoon – a plentiful place wedged between the barrier islands of our eastern coast and the mainland. It’s not that far.

The Indian River Lagoon (not really a river at all, which is why it can flow north or south on any given day, depending on how the wind affects its many whims) is known as the ‘ocean’s cradle’. Its mangrove wetlands and cosy salt marshes are perfect for breeding, nursing and feeding the thousands of biologically diverse plants and animals – 4,440 to be sort of exact, on its 156-mile, coastal estuary system.

The lagoon was originally called Río de Ais by the Spanish, after the Ais tribe who once flourished there, who ate bountifully from the lagoon: mullet, redfish, drum, turtles, manatees. They never farmed. Their middens are now launch pads at Cape Canaveral.

Nanu would love the recently hatched loggerhead and leatherback sea turtles.

We could be back by lunchtime.

But I am forgetting that it is bioluminescence season at the Indian River Lagoon. We will have to spend the night on a clear-bottomed kayak. Ideally, the night sky will be moonless. The humidity, heat and bugs will be at their worst. Perfect conditions for lighting up the lagoon blue, without sun, moon or electricity. Shocking beauty. Like a male peacock igniting his vibrant iridescent blue feathers all in one go. Hocus-pocus enchantment. Thanks to the lagoon’s algae-magicians.

Blue, blue, blue. Drenched in blue. Light shining through. Sparkling. Glittering. Mullets streak past, leaving blue trails behind them. Nasa rocket plumes writ small. Blue water droplets fall from our paddles. Rings on the surface, like a gassy manatee.

(I did not yet know that the lagoon’s bioluminescence can bloom out of control with too many nutrients from septic tanks, fertilisers, insecticides and other nasty things. I did not yet know of the countless innovations leading to extinction.)

(Later, I will understand Thomas Mann’s lagoony Death in Venice, in which the art historian Gustav von Aschenbach follows young Tadzio – in his boyish, English sailor suit – as a journey, a premonition of the doom to come. Flooding. Plaguing. Droughting. Earthquaking. Burning. Melting. Touching-feeling pedagogy. ‘The twilight of the immeasurable’. (10) )

Miles away, Nanu’s father, ‘Frank’, was tending his oversized wetland-loving white swamp rose mallow hibiscuses.

Their claret centres were blissing, blissing, blissing – there wasn’t much time left.

Lasting only a day, once bloomed, they plop off without sound. Their hairy green leaves, stems and buds (which are termed pubescent in botany, no matter the age), are sticky, prickly, velvety. Ever-adolescent. Like the girls we thought we would aways be.

At a much slower pace, butterfly orchids are growing epiphytically on the trunks of live oaks – their blind-earthworm roots are crowding their way into the cervices of the tree bark. 

Epi ‘upon’ + phyte ‘plant’. Epiphytes are ‘air plants’.

The sepals and petals of the butterfly orchids are a pale pistachio-green, with dabs of audible magenta – especially where the purplish-red colour deliciously sirens the labellum. The orchids drink the high humidity of the air and rainwater to provide them with moisture absorbed easily with their spongy, velvety roots.

Delicate ‘resurrection ferns’, also epiphytic, are sartorially making their way around the arms of the live oaks and into crevices between bough and trunk, where poetics flourish. In botany: a tree crotch.

Eve-tree. Fig-leaf ferns. Desire botanised.   

Without water, the delicate ferns appear dead, grey and shrivelled. With water, their once-crippled fronds are born again. Turn bright green. Invite hopeful touch. Like butterfly wings, nestlings and moss.

Epiphytes like orchids, resurrections ferns and Spanish moss, live on watery air, are not parasitic.

On the bank of the wetlands beyond the white wooden fence of Frank’s garden, an alligator is sunning itself. Prehistoric. Dystopic. Futuristic. Its black, thick scales are tire-tread armour. The giant blue heron chooses to stay away.

Alligators have looked the same for millions of years. A successful blueprint has enabled them to survive the climate changes of the past.

Ribbons of flypaper are hanging from the ceiling of the garden’s white gazebo – like vines coated with mango juices – dotted with dead black flies.

Beetles are skeletonising the leaves of Frank’s apple trees.

The moon is out today.

Giant yellow sunflowers with their thick bristly stems, their menacing petals, their black hole mouths are growing tall along the white fence, emitting an earthy scent as they might in any garden in America, only these sentinels are keeping watch for bobcats, coyotes, Florida black bears, Florida panthers, water moccasins, garter snakes, black racers, gators.

Nanu’s father sees neither the garter snake, nor the black racer. But they see him.

In a pool of water at the centre of a pink and green neoregelia, a little bright green tree frog resides.

A five-inch Florida lubber grasshopper is waiting for the mail, his flashy yellow and red body with black spots suggests a wild well-tailored suit. Its small wings, like very short tails of a morning coat, are only ornamental: lubbers are flightless. When disturbed, they emit a stinky foam from their thorax and a very loud HSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS.

As usual, peacocks roam the neighbourhood of South Tropical Trail. This day, they are not ripping lanai screens or scratching cars. Peacocks are difficult ornaments. (11)

Nanu’s mother (Viola del Cielo) was a famous ceramicist. Her studio was an extension of the domestic space. Very clean, especially for a ceramic studio. Even the cockroaches stayed away. A foreboding octopus bowl, with suction-cup-spit-curl tentacles, sits at the centre of the family’s dining table.

The family ate off Viola’s starfish plates. Drank from her octopus cups. Slurped soup from her turtle-shell bowls. ‘Nanu grew up terrified to break a pot,’ Viola would often say, with a little smile, a curious laugh.

Frank was an unsuccessful poet. Frank was a brilliant gardener. And Nanu was part of his garden, carefully tended. They liked to draw plants together. He thought she was fun to be around. He read American poetry to her: James Merrill, Elizabeth Bishop, Langston Hughes, Emily Dickinson. A favourite of theirs: Merrill’s ‘Developers at Crystal River’, a sad and concerned love letter to the indolent, foeless manatees of ‘Three Sister Springs’. Merrill wrote the poem for Bishop. It was her favourite animal, growing out of the many years she had lived in Key West:

There were still orange groves when Nanu burst into my life. Like the underground toil of the Cocoa nucifera, we developed our secrets from sand: transforming desert into coconuts, replete with sweet milk, impossibly white fragrant fruit.

Together we were beautiful: like pink evenings; roseate spoonbills; dolphins playing in the sea.

Together we were haunting, like the world around us.

Spanish moss.

Mangrove roots exposed along the banks of the tea-coloured St. Johns River.

Buzzards holding court around an armadillo, dead on the hot black asphalt – the leader always getting first dibs – the hierarchy to follow, always dismally the same.

Together we would ‘note the religious poses of roadkill…the instance of their death most terribly holy’. (13)

Green anole lizards blowing out their latex throat fans – supernatural – pink-red balloons – in and out with Morse-code frequency.

Batwing shadows from the palms on the luscious undulating lawns.

Together we were sad: like the boat propellor scars on the backs of indolent, whiskered mother-manatees swimming through the Crystal River with their babes.

Together we were bored: like causeways bridging the profound shallowness of Florida.

Together we had cruel optimism fed by Cape Canaveral trips to the moon.

She was a little mean.

She was very smart.

I wasn’t.

I wasn’t.

Perfect love.

What would become of the springs of our childhood? Our girl-on-girl love? What on earth were we heading for atop our precious Blue Marble?

From age nine until twenty-two our beautiful-haunting-sad lives were like a pair of orchids intertwined in a kingdom of permanent tenderness: sexual, delicate, exotic. We held onto our blossoms. And, like most orchids, we understood that we were capable of self-pollination. 

As we walked home from school, she gave me one of her pale-pink plastic leaping-deer barrettes.

If Nanu were to sit under Alta Vista’s live oak today, with its ambitious roots, its huge sprawling branches braced with wooden armature like crutches, with her back pressed hard against its mammoth trunk, its wooden heart still, she would sit as motionless as a yellow-bellied slider turtle basking on a log. Her long black curly hair would be grey and wilder than ever. And there she would hear the Spanish moss whispering in her ear – in a language learned from the tree – an epiphytical echo so foreign to my timpani (but not hers) – words, before words.

Nanu remembers being in the womb.

By the end, She felt very cramped. No more diving, playing and rolling in the warm lagoon waters. But she was ok with her tight digs.

Inside, Nanu heard beautiful, strange and worrying things: her own hummingbird-heart tapping out a bright allegro at 160 beats per minute; Mother’s big heart chugging along at 91 manatee-beats per minute. The faint branch-cracking sounds of Mother’s bald-cypress bones.

Sounds travelled mercilessly through the lagoony fluid to Nanu’s tiny baby-loggerhead inner ear.

Sounds on the timpani of the ear, echoes in the abysm of the mind, vibrate the body in some strange way.

Head, toes, fingers, bottom, skinny knees, tiny vagina, bloated belly, emerged out into the light. When she opened her eyes, it was as if she had emerged into a vast brightly illuminated watershed of heart monitors, oxygen tanks, forceps. A breathing tube floated like a water snake. White latex surgical gloves bobbed in the light along with medical green surgical masks. It was blinding.

Nanu was born blue with cyanosis. The umbilical cord had wrapped itself around her neck twice. When Nanu finally let out a cry of vowels, her skin unblued and pinked roseate spoonbill.

The date was 20 March 1957.

Nanu was so tiny: a little black comma.

Her life sentence began as a comma.

As if written by Clarice Lispector. (14)

Even then, she was thinking how to stretch out birth for a whole lifetime.

Once home, Viola took no interest in Nanu’s sweet scent.

Viola immediately went back to her studio-grotto­.

Had moments gone by or 3,000 years?

From the start, Nanu was expected to be an artist or a writer, like her parents. They travelled to museums in London, Madrid, New York. Every time they went to a museum, Viola and Frank gave Nanu a pencil and a notebook and set her free to wander where she liked. Not only did she draw: she wrote. Facing Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus at the Uffizi, Nanu wrote about a teenage girl, with impossibly long black hair (not red), who travelled in a motorised scallop-shell boat to the Everglades. Even then her writing had a Surrealist twist.

Together, Nanu and I wrote stories in Frank’s garden shed, where he stored his ‘beautiful aluminium boat with a gold stripe at the waterline’ (15) along with clay pots, a large steel watering can, potting soil, seed packets, rakes, shovels, spades and hoes. Sitting in the landlocked boat, we dreamed. Stories from the camera obscura of our little brains rushed out like water, like light, like cinema, like desire, like morning sunshine on the Indian River Lagoon. Everywhere our ‘little language’. Like lovers use. Or children.

Dragonfly. Butterfly. Horse. Seahorse. Manatee. Tiny octopus. Yearling. Moon. Fawn. Moon Ladder. I want. I want. Blueberries. Orchid. Blue velvet cape. Rocket. Barette in my pocket.

Sounds on the timpani of the ear, echoes in the abysm of the mind, vibrate the body in some strange way.

The shed was alive when we were inside it writing. It liked being full of us.

We imagined the shed to be the little house where Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings wrote The Yearling, which looked like a child’s log cabin, nestled in the swamps and backwoods of northern Florida. Inside our little house, we rewrote The Yearling from the perspective of two girls – changing the name of the fawn from Flag to Acacia – and made our own ending. In our book, the deer does not die: Acacia lives.

One moon-filled night, while I was sleeping over at Nanu’s, Frank woke us up to see the awakening of a night-blooming cereus: the big blossom that opens only once a year and always at night.

We sat inside the lanai on white wrought-iron garden chairs, with cushions printed with red hibiscuses and ruby-throated hummingbirds. We held hands. We stared into the magic of the petals unfolding without hurry, like the words of Proust’s In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs). The blossom released an unusual scent of vanilla and nutmeg. By dawn, the flower’s stem was spent and flaccid. The flower’s head drooped, as if in shame. For a little while, the already-bloomed night-blooming cereus held the paradoxical languor of us, thirteen-year-old girls: neither adult, nor child­ – neither night nor day.

Come fall, Nanu went off to the Putney School, a progressive boarding school in Vermont. She was only thirteen.

Her father gave her his old fountain pen­ to take with her – and soon it would bleed with 50 million ideas.

At Putney, she had a teacher who stimulated her enormously, introducing her over the years to Proust, Henry James, Colette, William Bartram, Marguerite Duras, André Breton, Franz Kafka, Sylvia Plath, Sappho, Françoise Sagan, Vladimir Nabokov, Mann, Lispector.

Reading 'The Smallest Woman in the World’, translated from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Bishop, Nanu felt happiness in the story’s expression of pain – felt Lispector in the most secret parts of herself.

By the end of her first year, she was just on fire to write, write, write.

(Peter Willcox was three years ahead of her at Putney. Nanu caught glimpses of him for a few years, before he graduated. She did not know that he would become a famous sea captain for Greenpeace.)

I missed her.

She, too, felt alone.

Afraid for herself and the end of the world.

Her spirits fell, but she refused to let her passion be cured.

Alone in her boarding-school room, Nanu listened to one 45 rpm vinyl over and over on her portable record player. Round, round, round. His falsetto so beautiful. So dizzying. So breathy. Airy. Feminine.

She hears him in her.

She hears her in him.

She writes his fable lyrics in an old stamp album bought at a vintage shop.

Did Nanu ever learn that Neil Young wrote the song for an unproduced film about an ecological disaster?

­When Nanu comes home for Christmas vacation, I kiss her exhausted face, exhausted with a pleasure that had not yet taken place.

She visits her grandmother and brings home a ledger book. Old but unused. She draws, writes, cuts and glues in her grandmother’s ledger, along with the stamp album and many more ‘found’ books to come (figs. 1, 2 and 3).

She comes home to Florida with her journals in hand every summer until she is eighteen.

I found her one night crumpled on a large window seat. I spoke to her gently: girl to girl. I used our ‘little language’. Sounds on the timpani of the ear, echoes in the abysm of the mind, vibrate the body in some strange way. I fingered the pale-pink plastic leaping-deer barrette in my pocket. My Nanu fetish. I inched slowly towards her staying close to the ground. We spoke for a long time. At least it seemed like a long time. We only whispered. I did not want to startle her. I told her that I loved her, loved her notebooks, loved her writing, loved all that is her special voice. I talked to her about manatees, night-blooming cereus, horses, swamp rose hibiscus flowers, blue velvet capes, blueberry muffins, Sappho, armadillos. I told her that there is still a lot of beauty in the world.

Suddenly, the bare light bulb above us breaks. A jet of golden light bursts from the broken bulb and floods the room. A child appears in an aluminium rowboat with a golden line painted around the draft line. She is floating on the light – as if writ in water. The child is the girl that Nanu once was. Her long black curly hair is wild with a mind of its own. Her white sailor dress with navy-blue trim, once again, catches my eye. Fashion from another time. Wrinkled and in need of ironing. On the back of the sailor-collar flap are two navy stars and a small moss-green grass stain. The child gently asks Nanu to stand and come into the boat, while offering her hand. Nanu gently steps in. The boat rocks a bit back and forth, like a cradle. And they are off, with Nanu dreamily in the bow seat and the child slowly rowing the boat around the room on the warm golden light. The only sound is the plashing of the water and droplets falling from the oars. It’s a very pretty sound. They go around once. Twice. Three times. Finally, the shiny boat is back at the window seat, magically moored with a rope of golden light. While moored, the child leans forward and whispers in Nanu’s ear, loud enough for me to hear: ‘It’s good to have someone show you the way.’ Then she nimbly jumps out of the boat, without a sound, and helps Nanu back onto the window seat.

The window is now open. I feel a warm breeze coming in from the darkness – the outside, over there. The smell sulphury, yet fresh. Standing on the window seat, Nanu looks down at me and calmly notes:

1. Nanu del Cielo’s journal, c.1973, ‘R is for reticent’, Special & Area Studies Collections, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida, Gainesville, Special Collections.
2. Nanu del Cielo’s journal, c.1973, envelope with movable card, ‘in the womb’. Special & Area Studies Collections, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida, Gainesville, Special Collections.
3. Nanu del Cielo’s journal, c.1973, envelope with movable card, ‘leaving the womb’. Special & Area Studies Collections, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida, Gainesville, Special Collections.