Bok Tower fairy houses.

Once or twice a year I visit our nation's most polarizing appendage. I am quick to point out that I am NOT "from Florida" but rather, most of my immediate family has moved there over the past decade. Regional bias aside, I enjoy these trips. The whole state is full of oddities and roadside attractions.

Bok Tower itself is one of those places that shouldn't exist — a 205-foot Art Deco carillon tower rising out of the highest point in peninsular Florida (which, okay, is only 298 feet above sea level, but still). Edward Bok built it in the 1920s as a gift to the American people, a "sanctuary for humans and birds," and it's exactly as strange and beautiful as that sounds.

But I didn't come for the tower. I came for what's hidden in the gardens around it.

Tucked into the roots of live oaks and nestled under ferns, there are dozens of tiny houses. Fairy houses. Some are rough — stacked stones, a scrap of bark for a roof. Others are intricate: shingled with seeds, fitted with windows, furnished with acorn-cap chairs. They appear and change and multiply, built by visitors and volunteers and — if you're the type to believe in such things — maybe by other hands entirely.

Florida is a threshold state. Limestone on water. Land that can't decide if it's solid. And in threshold places, the old stories say, other things can slip through.

DECEMBER 2025
Leica q2