After the elections, please "Wake me up when it's over." Every time I hear this song by Avicii, I think back to the first time I heard it. It was night, deep in the Everglades. Nokosee was singing it to me on the chickee stage in the New Seminole's hidden camp, draped in camo netting on one of a thousand dark hammocks floating in the river of grass. If you read my books, you know the NS have their own band and enough stored electricity in hundreds of car batteries and gas generators to light up the swamp and make their instruments wail. Which is what they did that unforgettable night. I was only 18 then and pregnant with my baby Haalie. It was our wedding night. I had just sang my song to him, Gayle McCormick's Baby It's You and made my big boy cry. Then he did the Avicii song. It made me cry too. And it also scared me. By the time he got around to singing it to me it was dark. I swore the pulsating lights and music volume could be heard and felt in Miami, about 40-miles to the east. I knew Micco Mann and Uncle Sam and his Army Rangers would find us for sure. But, despite the disco ball and the explosion of light popping through the camo netting and hammock trees, no one found us that night. That picture above is Nokosee and me when I was singing to him. I was dancing around him pow-wow style and stripping his Seminole jacket away so I could see his to-die-for body. Unfortunately, we don't have any of him singing to me but it will always be etched in my mind. It was like I was at the Ultra Music Festival in Miami with thousands of people my age screaming like crazy. But really, it was only me looking up at my new husband as he sang his song to me, a song about me. And him. "They tell me I'm too young to understand. They say I'm caught up in a dream... All this time I was finding myself, I didn't know I was lost." Until we found each other in the beauty of the Everglades and the horror of the chosen path of the New Seminole.
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