Welcome to Episode 33 of From the Front Porch, a collection of conversations on books, small business, and life in the South.

I'm Annie Jones, owner of the bookshelf, an independent bookstore in downtown Thomasville, Georgia.

And today I'm joined by Sue Cerulean, an author and naturalist from nearby Tallahassee, Florida.

Sue will be joining us in the store on Thursday, July 23rd from 5 to 7 p.m. for a shelf

talk and signing in honor of her newest book, Coming to Pass. Today we'll be talking to Sue

about our beautiful part of the country, what makes it unique, and what we

can do to keep it vibrant. Let's get started.

Hi Sue, thanks for joining me today.

I'm so glad to be talking with you, Annie. I really am.

We have been looking forward to Thursday's events so much. We've got so many people in

Thomasville and in the surrounding

areas who like you are passionate about the coast and I was curious where you grew up

or where you call home and I wondered if that influenced your love of the water.

I think it definitely did. I actually grew up in relationship to the coast, kind of like people in Thomasville do, to the North Florida coast, and that is, you know, a distance, a small distance away. So it made it into something that was really special and that you

look forward to and that was a bit of a journey. I did go up in the foothills of New Jersey.

Okay.

Most people don't know New Jersey has foothills.

And so we would go to the Jersey Shore as often as we could.

My mother was really a water lover, and she, I think it was, as so often as the case,

it was my mother's enthusiasm about going to the water as the most important thing.

And so here I am myself living about 30 miles from the North Florida coast. And I always

wonder, you know, what would it take for me to actually live there? I don't know. But I call

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