Roselle Agles

BY MARCY SHORTUSE - Roselle Agles has been through a spiritual and emotional transition since returning to Boca Grande, one she calls a “beautiful, tumultuous journey.” When she came back in February to visit, she was shocked by how much she had missed the island. Now she has come back permanently and wants to give back to the community.

Roselle is currently selling some of her works at four Boca Grande businesses. Greeting cards graced with her art and photography are available now at the Port Boca Grande Lighthouse Museum, at the Boca Grande Historical Society, at Serendipity and Fine Things and at Native Gardens.

You might remember her as the manager of the Galleria. She and her parents, Chuck and Pat Agles, ran the business for many years. Just before the Agles sold the building Roselle also ran a small organic cafe within, called Jangala.

After the Galleria closed, Roselle started volunteering at her children’s Montessori school in Venice. She was trying to figure out what to do next when the school approached her about teaching.
“It was always a quiet childhood dream of mine to teach,” she said. “So I accepted a position to teach art, as well as a bit of Spanish.”

Roselle and her parents took a vacation to Santa Fe, N.M., and became enamored of the area. One of her artistic inspirations, Georgia O’Keefe, took much of her passion from the area, and while it was the polar opposite of Boca Grande for Roselle and her parents, they decided to stay.

“The art and culture there is very rich, but I wasn’t quite sure what I was getting into when I signed up to make it a permanent place to live,” she explained. “I got a job teaching kindergarten at the Catholic school where my children, Noah and Zoe, were attending, and that was a very cool experience. I grew a lot as a teacher there, and as a person. But there were a lot of things there that just weren’t ‘home’ for me.”

Life gets busy for a single mom of two, and she realized one day that in the five years she had been gone she hadn’t visited Boca Grande once. In February of this year she and the kids returned for a visit.
“The island was calling me, and I needed to figure out how to make it work,” she said. “When I got back it was a realization that I had been lost in translation, so to speak.”

To read more of this story, pick up a Boca Beacon on newsstands today or click here to subscribe to our print or e-edition newspaper.View More images >>

( 0 Votes )