Monday, April 22, 2013

A Love Letter To Florida


That picture has nothing to do with anything except for the fact that I like it so very much. When I was five years old, my mother and my brother and I moved to Florida and it was still a very wild place and mystical and magical, especially for a child who lived in a very small village on the banks of a river where there were woods and jungle and white-sand roads and mangoes and oranges and grapefruit growing on trees and even an island which a very tall man took us to visit in his boat where the fossils of mammoths quite literally littered the ground. Teeth and vertebra, there for the picking up and taking home. The Atlantic Ocean was only a few miles away and to get there we crossed a wooden bridge which bump, bump, bumped as we crossed it and there was a drawbridge and a man with one arm seemed to live in a little hut, right there on the bridge, and when a tall boat came down the river, traffic stopped and he turned the giant wheel with that one strong arm so that a piece of the bridge swung out and the boat came through and once, I swear to you, I saw a Chinese junk sail through and that was only one bit of the magic of the Florida I lived in.
It seems to me that before we moved to Florida, everything was in black and white and then suddenly, like when Dorothy landed in Oz, everything was in a sort of brilliant, tropical Technicolor, everything red and pink and orange and bright green and blue. We had lived in Chattanooga before we moved and that was a beautiful place but it might have been a completely different planet from the place where we landed on the banks of the Sebastian River near the ocean.
Not only was there the true, real magic of the place- the mangoes and the river and the ocean and the stingray we caught off the dock and the cruising sharks we could see from that dock and the birds and the man named Chester who had hair down his back and a beard like Christ long before the hippies, who lived deep in the woods and grew turnips and sold them door-to-door and Aunt Katie who was the village's oldest resident who told stories of when she was a child and there were no roads and the rivers were the only way to travel from one place to another and the Indians who would go by in their canoes and sometimes stop to borrow her family's dogs for hunting- not only was there all of that but there were also the beautiful, wonderful, kitschy tourist attractions starring parrots and monkeys and alligators and mermaids before Disney came and the hungry mouse named Mickey gobbled them all up, never to be seen again.
And sometimes, to a child, at least, the best part of those tourist traps were the gift shops where you could buy necklaces with sunsets made of butterfly wings and earrings made of tiny seashells, painted unlikely colors, and orange blossom perfume and pecan logs and salt water taffy and intricate tableus made of shells which you could plug in and which would light up and those little Seminole dolls made of palmetto fiber with beads and earrings and dresses of incredibly colored, pieced and rick-racked fabric.

I had one, I think, as a child that a friend of my mother's gave me and I do not know what happened to that doll or to my mammoth teeth either. But I have found the three dolls you see above in various places and when I find one, I am always happy and if it's not too pricey (and oh! they are not cheap anymore!) I buy it and bring it home.

They remind me, those dolls, of the good part of my childhood- the part that no one could destroy for me with sadness or with neglect or with pain because there was that magical part which was so strong where pirates could well have buried treasure in the ground beside my house near the river or where I could still feel quite clearly the ghosts of the Indians and the wild cats Aunt Katie talked about and the beach which was still wild and free of houses for miles and miles and where Spanish doubloons were sometimes found and once I came across the body of a dead shark and I have never gotten that image out of my mind, that sandpaper skin, that jaw of deadly teeth. 

I miss that part of Florida and amazingly, some of it is still there. I have talked about Roseland, where we lived, many times. It is one of the best parts of who I am. It is the part which sustained me during what, looking back, I now realize was one of the worst times of my life. Perhaps the very worst. And being a child, I had so very few resources to help me through it all. But I had a few adults who, although they didn't have any idea what was really going on in my life, seemed to know that I needed special care and they gave it freely and with love. And I had all of that magic which my child's mind took and wove into a sort of protective quilt which I could crawl under and be safe. Or, at least, a little bit safe.

I remember one night I "camped out" with my best friend Lucille Ferger in a tent we'd made in her yard by stretching a blanket from the side of an out building to their chicken coop and we had peanut butter and saltine crackers and those coils you could burn to keep off the mosquitoes and I remember us sitting outside our homemade tent, looking up at the sky and above us in the quiet night were so many stars that the word "infinite" took on meaning for the first time.
I have never seen sky like that since then and I never expect to again but I will tell you this- the wonder of those stars, their infinite number, the infinite totality of space, gave me a perspective which, along with the river, the ocean, the magic of Chester and the Chinese junk and the presence of the ghosts of the people who had lived there so long before me, sustained me and lives within me still.

That's why I like that picture. That's why I love my little dolls.

I am from Florida, even though I was not born here. She took me in and allowed me to stay in her hot, snaky, watery, prickly, sandy, jungly, mango-stained bosom. And for most of my life now, I have taken solace in it, be it cold winter or steaming summer, in gentle salt-water waves and freezing cold springs and rivers with water as clear as gin. Now I live far from the Atlantic and closer to the Gulf; I live where oak trees which are hundreds of years old shade me and offer me a bit of that same sense of the infinite which I gleaned under the stars in Lucille Ferger's yard beside a chicken coop where a mean red rooster named Kruschev slept on his roost.

Florida has changed a lot since I was a child so long ago but great fishes still sleep in its waters, there are still old Spanish treasures to be discovered, there are arrowheads and spearpoints to be found which perhaps pierced the hide of the great mammoth whose bones still rest in its earth along with the bones of the men who hunted them so bravely with such small and deadly weapons. And one of the greatest gifts of my life is that I arrived here at a time when my need and my imagination both were greatest.

I love that picture. I love my dolls.

I still love Florida.

Now remind me of all of this when hurricane season begins, which will be soon because Florida does not give a shit that I live here and love it. She is as cruel as she is beautiful and no matter who tries to tame it with pavement and with dredging and with theme parks and with air conditioning, ultimately, we are at her mercy and we are best not to forget that, even on a warm spring night when the air is so soft and the tea olive is perfuming the air and the resurrection fern decorates the branches of the ancient oaks and good Lord! as if on cue, the first whippoorwill that I've heard this year calls so sweetly and distantly from the swamp south of my house. There are already mosquitoes which live by feeding on our blood and the bamboo grows at the rate of six inches a day or more. And you know what? I don't care.
I love it here.

Sleep well but not too long because the wisteria will cover and bind you.

Love...Ms. Moon










11 comments:

  1. "Strangely enough, it still surprised her to open that window and not see Kentucky."

    -Barbara Kingsolver

    I understand that longing, even if you are home.

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  2. You know what? This is a New Yorker essay.

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  3. Oh boy, does this ever resonate with me. No matter where I live, Florida always seems like home, the smells and sounds and heat and humidity. The white shell marl roads which the oil trucks would spray with old oil to keep the dust down. The smell of all that overripe citrus fruit rotting beneath the trees in the yard -- because, you know, you just can't eat it all.

    I think those of us who grew up in Florida really DID experience something special, and something which, as you say, is largely gone now. I remember all those "Parrot Jungle" type roadside attractions. Sometimes you'd stop at a gas station and they'd have parrots in a cage there -- or maybe even a monkey. Kind of crazy and probably inhumane, but as you said, it was a different time.

    And pecan logs! Ha! We used to always stop at Stuckey's for pecan logs on any road trip.

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  4. You know, Florida never felt like home to me. Maybe it's because we moved when I was 12 and I felt torn away from friends. Long gone are all the orange groves I used to ride my horse in--the alligator "Allie" that lived in the lake behind our house that came for marshmallows if you clapped your hands but was blind in one eye so you had to be careful to be on his good side, and my mother used to feed him chicken bones with a pair of serving tongs!--it did have its own special charm.

    Stuckey's! Yes, on our way down on vacations to FL (before we moved) we'd also stop for pecan logs. Every time I see an old Stuckey's building at an interstate exit I feel nostalgia.

    We used to love to stop at South of the Border for trinkets and souvenirs. Did you ever have an alligator purse? I did. The head was the clasp.

    I've never seen those Seminole dolls before. Love them!

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  5. I've never felt that way about a place. Florida is lucky she has you!
    Dreading hurricane season must be like me dreading winter. I feel for you.

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  6. SJ- It's a real thing, a need to be in a certain place, even through the changes.

    Elizabeth- Yeah. I'm sure they'll be calling me today.
    (But honestly- you have no idea how much I appreciate you saying that.)

    Steve Reed- I agree. And oh hell yes- the rotting fruit. Sacks of it in our garage. It took me years before I'd buy citrus in the store in N. Florida because I couldn't fathom paying money for what in my childhood had been so freely abundant. And I remember those caged birds and beasts. Absolutely.

    Lynne- You would not have known that alligator if you had lived in Ohio. That's pretty wild. I never did have an alligator purse but I sure do remember them.

    heartinhand- We do dread hurricane season. We just never know how it's going to play out.

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  7. Good god. A tour de force, Ms. Moon. A beautiful hurricane of a piece. I gobbled it up.

    Really. This is something special.

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  8. Oh! And did you read Swamplandia! by Karen Russel? I thought of it when you described (and made me long for) those old tourist parks.

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  9. Ms. Vesuvius-Thank you. Really, really- I appreciate that so much.
    And I did read Swamplandia and I thought I was going to love it and I didn't. In fact, it did very little for me at all. It left me cold despite the subject matter which should have kept me fascinated. Just one of those things.

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  10. So beautiful. I love the bit about the mammoths - I remember talking to my mother about creationists, and she said she couldn't understand how anyone could not believe in dinosaurs as she'd grown up in the same way, evidence of them everywhere.

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  11. A beautiful tribute to the place that you love. It is truly a love story when you find the place where you belong. I love this place where I live but I also have so many fond memories of growing up in Virginia.

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