Coming to Sarasota in 1983 as a newlywed and finding herself unable or unwilling to shake the sand from her toes, Erin McLeod since racked up 33 years making friends and taking names in this coastal community, building bridges and connecting like-minded movers and shakers across a diverse spread of interlocking circles. “My life is like a Venn diagram on steroids,” she says. Joining the Friendship Centers in 2004 after 10 years at the Longboat Key Club, McLeod was named president and CEO of the Center as of January. McLeod says she finally found her “lifelong home” with a mission and people she can believe in. “I feel like I was born for this,” she says.

Hiking Outdoors

I’m an avid hiker. I just got back from a hiking trip to Arizona and Utah. We went to Zion. We went to the Grand Canyon. We went to Antelope Canyon. You spend your whole life inside for work. I’m a naturalist by nature anyway. I love rock formations and geology. If we were to walk the beach, I could tell you what most of the shells were that you were looking at. 

Word Games

I love crossword puzzles and Sudoku and the Cryptoquote and the Jumble—love those. You know those word searches that were just a bunch of letters and diagonal words and horizontal words? I would always flip them upside down and look at them and the words would pop out at me just like that.

Nudging Nirvana

I meditate almost every day. I have a couple apps and when I get bored with one I move to another. You can play birds chirping, you can have chanting, you can have a guided meditation in someone’s voice taking you through your body, out of your body or wherever you need to go. Sometimes it’s just silence. And you can do it for a couple minutes or you can do it for an hour.

Church of the Redeemer

I’m a religious person; I have a church-home that I’ve been involved with for over 30 years. I call it a home because they’re like my family. It’s a community of people and we take care of one another; we take care of the community and the people around us. Honest to God, I think that’s the answer.

Henrietta

I have a very dear friend who is 103 and a half [years old]. We were at the Community Foundation and we just clicked. I call her every night at 10pm. We tuck each other in bed at night. She’ll go, “Are you in your PJs?” and I’ll say, “Are you in your PJs?” We say, “I love you” every night. That’s the last thing she hears at night before she goes to bed—how important she is to somebody. She’s my family.

Classical Piano

I’m a trained classical pianist and grew up playing piano since I was a little kid. Even in college I played some as the rehearsal pianist for the ballet company and also played for the women’s gymnastic team, which required me to take sheets of music and cut them apart. The gymnasts rearrange the music depending on their floor routine. It was crazy. 

Cozy Kitchen

My husband and I like to cook—and cook together. We have a deal: whoever gets home first cooks and the other person has to clean. I don’t mind cooking next to somebody though, so if I come in and see he’s getting started, I’ll chop or I’ll stir or whatever he wants me to do. I’m not a recipe-cooker—I don’t ever look at recipe books. I have a great chicken tortilla soup. It’s killer.

Mudslinging

Some people only know me as a potter. They don’t know what else I do, they just see me covered in mud and think that’s what I look like all the time. We threw a couple weeks ago—a friend of mine has a wheel and kiln in their garage. I bet I could teach you. The clay decides what it wants to be. People try to muscle the clay to be what they want it to be and it knows what it wants to be.

Hard Bach Guitar

I always wanted to play classical guitar and I took lessons a few years ago. I was at the farmer’s market one Saturday morning and there was a nice guy playing this Bach prelude—you’d know it if you heard it—and I asked him to play it again and threw some money in his case. I sat down on the sidewalk and listened to him play and said, “Will you give me lessons?” I wanted to play that particular Bach prelude. It was intense, but I wanted to learn it and I did.

A Land Remembered, by Patrick Smith

I love Florida history and I love Florida authors. It’s about the early settlers in Florida and it follows a family through about four or five generations. You’ll never, ever drive across the state and look at it the same way again. It’s one of those books that you just have to read. Kind of a Florida Faulkner. It’s up there with Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and she wrote Cross Creek and The Yearling.

Game Night

We have really good friends. We have a group that we’ve developed over the years—our local family—and we get together with them almost every week and play board games and cards. [My husband] loves to dream up and invent games, so sometimes we’ll bust out one of his. Now that the weather’s gotten nice again, we go to the beach on Friday nights and play bocce and watch the sun set.