Barefoot Between Two Shores
Trading steel skies for sunlit stories.
In Pittsburgh, I wore boots.
Real ones.
Not the kind you slip into for style, but the kind that carry weight—steel-toed, salt-stained, stiff from cold mornings where the air hits your face before you’re ready for it. Boots that waited by the door like a warning, reminding you that stepping outside meant bracing yourself.
Winter didn’t ask.
It arrived.
And you learned how to meet it—layer by layer, breath by breath, pushing through gray skies that stretched longer than they should, building a life that required stamina before it ever offered ease.
Back then, my creativity lived inside that same rhythm.
Ideas came sharp, fast, and necessary, like survival had found its way into everything I touched.
I wrote with urgency.
I worked with grit.
I moved forward because standing still wasn’t an option.
And for a long time, I believed that was what living meant.
Until one day, I didn’t want to power through anymore.
Now, I wake before the world does.
Sometimes it’s in SW Florida.
Sometimes it’s in our villa in the Dominican Republic.
The setting shifts, but the ritual remains.
Barefoot on cool tile.
A quiet house still wrapped in sleep.
The soft hum of the coffee machine breaks the silence.
The smell comes first—rich, warm, slightly sweet, with a depth that feels almost grounding, like it reaches into you before the first sip ever does.
I carry the cup outside.
And the sky is always in that same moment of becoming—a thin line of gold stretching across the horizon, the water still and glassy, the air holding that faint trace of salt and warmth that settles into your skin before you even notice it’s there.
Different coastline.
Same feeling.
The sunshine is my guide now.
This is where my day begins.
Sometimes I write.
Fingers moving before my thoughts can catch up, stories rising without permission,
sentences unfolding in long, unbroken lines that feel less like effort and more like something that has been waiting all night to be said.
This is the hour where truth doesn’t hesitate.
Other mornings, I don’t write at all.
I walk through a space instead.
A room that feels unfinished.
A corner holding too much silence.
A home that hasn’t quite found its rhythm yet.
And I begin to reimagine it— not forcing something new into it, but uncovering what’s already there, what belongs, what’s been waiting quietly to be seen.
Light shifting across a wall.
Texture catching just enough shadow.
The way one piece, placed right, can change everything.
This is my other language.
Words on some days.
Spaces on others.
Both telling stories.
Lately, there’s been something else unfolding too—
A slower kind of creativity.
One that doesn’t rush.
One that doesn’t already know the ending.
I’ve started cooking again.
Not out of necessity, but out of curiosity.
Yesterday, it was a Gruyère cheese quiche.
The buttery crust pressed gently into the pan, the richness of the cheese melting into something deeper as it baked, the scent filling the kitchen in a way that felt both new and familiar—warm, layered, quietly indulgent.
Tonight, it’s shrimp over rice with a pineapple chutney.
Bright.
Layered.
Sweet meeting savory in a way that feels a little like this life—unexpected, but exactly right.
I’m learning to enjoy the process again.
By midday, the world has fully arrived.
The sun no longer hesitates—it claims the sky.
I move inside, something light on a plate, and then I step into water—pool or ocean, depending on where I’ve landed that week.
No performance.
No urgency.
Just the quiet weightlessness of floating beneath a sky that feels endless, the kind of blue that makes you forget there was ever gray.
Here, time loosens.
You stop measuring your day by what you’ve done
and start noticing how it feels to be inside of it.
Living between these two worlds changes you.
SW Florida offers ease, rhythm, a life that feels grounded and intentional.
The Dominican Republic holds something wilder, more instinctive, where nature moves freely and asks you to do the same.
Between them, I’ve found something I didn’t know I was looking for.
A life that moves with light instead of against it.
Pittsburgh raised me.
It taught me how to endure, how to push, how to build something out of nothing and keep going even when stopping would have been easier.
But this life— this sunlit, salt-kissed, ever-shifting life— rewrote me.
It taught me how to soften without losing strength.
How to breathe without earning it.
How to live without bracing for impact.
And still— there are moments when everything feels exactly right, the coffee warm in my hands, the sun rising exactly where it should, the air soft and full— and I miss them.
My son.
My grandson.
Not in a way that interrupts the beauty.
But in a way that deepens it.
Because the life I built there is part of the life I carry here.
And some distances aren’t measured in miles.
They’re measured in moments you wish you could share.
So now I live somewhere in between.
Fierce at 4 a.m., when the stories come and the world is still.
Floating by 4 p.m., when the sun softens and the day exhales.
Moving between places, but guided by the same thing every time—light.
Some people come to Florida to retire.
I came here to rewire.
To loosen urgency.
To soften edges.
To remember that life isn’t something to power through.
It’s something to live inside of.
And if you ever wonder what freedom tastes like— it’s in that first sip of coffee at sunrise, in the quiet rhythm of a recipe you’ve never tried before, in the warmth of a place that asks nothing of you but presence.
Come find me barefoot, somewhere between two shores, with a mind full of stories and spaces still becoming, a heart that holds both distance and love, and just enough salt in the air to remind me
I didn’t leave my life behind.
I expanded it.
Stories told in words and spaces.
With love and light, from the shady side of paradise — Cyndi 🖤