"May. Entering Florida."

So we read in “Before: An Inventory,” a lyrical composite of images and experiences that closes out the collection of essays I read for this week’s challenge. Picking up various options in fits and starts, I finally settled on Sunshine State by memoirist Sarah Gerard.

 In the preceding essays, however, Gerard, interlaces her personal history with that of historical and contemporary figures who shaped, in some small part, her story.

 “In 1862, Mary Baker Eddy traveled…to see a famous healer named Phineas Parkhurst Quimby.”

“If it’s not your family who brings you in, it’s probably a friend.”

“I first saw G.W. in a 2006 documentary called Easy Street.”

“My father and I were pallbearers.”

In “Sunshine State,” the most mesmerizing essay of the collection, Gerard volunteers at the Suncoast Seabird Sanctuary hoping to write an essay on birds.  In it, she writes:

“The cover of the August 1974 issue of Smithsonian shows a blue heron standing on a grassy bank in front of a calm lake. A hunter’s arrow dangles from its throat."

But coming across the sanctuary’s director, who wanders around shirtless and acts, well, a bit odd, she begins investigating the people who have been running the place since the early 1970s. She ends the essay with a few pages on Magnolia, a conure she and her husband foster for a few days before deciding they don’t have the energy to cater to her whims nor the tolerance for her mess.