Where Snowbirds Play: Rediscovering Palm Beach Through Memory, Mystery & Time
- laurie2769
- Dec 18, 2025
- 3 min read
There are places we arrive in for the first time and somehow recognize—not with the mind, but with something older, instinctive, and felt. For me, Palm Beach was exactly that. From the moment my husband and I landed there more than thirty years ago, its seaside light, subtropical fauna, and chorus of cicadas awakened memories of my childhood summers on the Adriatic coast of what was the communist Yugoslavia. The lizards darting across sunlit walls, geckos warming on stone, the soft coo of mourning doves—familiar details in an unfamiliar landscape—hinted at a mystery beneath the postcard-perfect surface. So when my husband set his heart on moving to a Jack Nicklaus golf course in the Sunshine State, I found little reason to resist.
My parents, however, were horrified. “Florida is for old people,” they insisted—without, of course, placing themselves in that category. Still, I agreed to the move with the private assurance that we could always escape to our New York apartment whenever paradise felt too perfect.
That escape never came. A canoe trip up the Loxahatchee River changed everything, revealing a Florida far richer, wilder, and more ancient than I had imagined. Our true neighbors were not the CEOs and socialites of The Shiny Sheet, but the three-hundred-pound sea turtles nesting on our beach—prehistoric creatures whose quiet majesty reoriented the world around us.
Yet life in Florida is never lived without a watchful eye on the horizon. Hurricanes, real or imagined, shape the rhythms of all who settle here. Even the word itself—hurakan, meaning “god of the storm”—echoes through my novel Where Snowbirds Play, threading myth and meteorology into the story’s emotional landscape.
Still, Palm Beach glittered on. Its winter season spun through grand ballrooms and storied private clubs, where beauty came with an entrance fee of near-mythic proportions—and where leaving was even harder than joining. It wasn’t until I befriended one of its brightest luminaries, the indomitable doyenne who would inspire my character Vanessa Vine, that I began to see the island with a writer’s clarity. Beneath its elegance lay a world of hidden allegiances, shifting power, and lives lived at once publicly and invisibly.
This duality—real and imagined, glamorous and mysterious—became the compass for Where Snowbirds Play, a novel set in 1991, when the sea turtles faced imminent extinction and the island’s social world operated by rules both explicit and unspoken. Through the eyes of an idealistic English marine biologist, I sought to portray a place where nothing is quite what it seems, and where the most revealing truths often hide in plain sight.
Palm Beach can be known, but only if one looks beyond its gleam. Its sandy beaches, coral reefs, quiet lake trails, and Moorish-inspired hotels still offer clues to its deeper identity. Even the giant fig tree of the novel—its roots rising like sculptural ribbons—still spreads its branches over the Royal Poinciana Plaza. And for readers curious about how the sea turtles were ultimately saved, the Loggerhead Marine Life Center remains a living chapter of the island’s story. The path stretches further still: through Miami’s iconic Art Deco district and down US-1 to Key Largo Dry Rocks, where the underwater statue Christ of the Deep brings my journey full circle—from Adriatic shores to the life of a South Florida “snowbird.”
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