Although I like where I am, I still think about my old house in SC sometimes, forlorn and waiting, the one I left to come to Florida.
After living there for over a decade, I can mentally retrace every part of the house. I remember its airy open spaces and the many windows that spilled sunlight onto the furniture and sea-green carpet, touching everything with gold. The house features in hundreds of my memories, but due to a sudden December layoff, its role in my life is over.
Despite my attachment to the house, my final memories of being in it were not the best: a leaky faucet, invading ants, and breaking appliances. The job offer that led to the Florida move was a welcome relief.
Luckily I like Florida. At my old home in SC I was more attached to my house than the area surrounding it. Here, the reverse is true. I like my new apartment, but the natural beauty outdoors is the true draw.
When I walk from the pool to my apartment with water droplets sliding down my bare legs, the scenery enchants me: the curtains of Spanish moss, the small scurrying lizards, the aquatic wildlife, a lake that greens toward dusk.
And there is something else about Florida: the sky.
I stare at it a lot. The sky is blue pretty much everywhere but there does seem to be a difference in the blue of a clear Florida sky, a rich bluer-than-blue Crayola radiance, but I often wonder if I am only imagining it.
Of course, not every day is sunny and clear. It rains a lot in Florida, torrential thunderstorms that crack the sky with lightening as wind whips palm trees and pummels buildings, and the lights indoors flicker. Sometimes even when it is sunny, the sky spits water just to show that it can, and steam rises ghost-like from the hot pavement.
For the first few weeks of the rainy season, I stayed wet a lot. I had forgotten to pack an umbrella when we moved and we could never remember to pick one up at a store. Weeks into summer, running to the car in the rain with a jacket over my head I would say, “Why do we keep forgetting to buy an umbrella?”
I have gotten used to the almost daily rain showers. Except for my swimming pool jaunts, on most days I stay in and write anyway. I would probably never go anywhere if my husband Donnie were not always pulling me out of the apartment with, “Come on. We’re in Florida. Let’s go out and do stuff!”
“I am doing stuff,” I tell him. “Writing is stuff.Going out and doing stuff is overrated.”
Despite my protests, weekends allow many options for having fun, such as Ormond Beach on the Atlantic coast and Clearwater Beach on the Gulf.
The fun of swimming in the Gulf took me by surprise. I had heard that the waves were gentler, but I loved the drama of hard-crashing waves so I thought I would miss them.
I was grumpy at first and wanted to go back home and write; crowds thronged the shore, broken seashells on the sand stabbed my feet, and the heat blazed down with relentless force. Unlike the windy beaches I was used to, here the air was still and offered no relief from the sweltering July heat.
Desperate for any shade, I pulled my floppy blue anti-freckle hat around my ears.
But once I entered the cool water my opinion of the Gulf changed. It was like a day in the Atlantic Ocean when the waves are especially calm.
The gentle waves and the cool undercurrents seduced me into taking off my hat while I tried to calculate how many nose freckles a hat-free swim in the gulf was worth.
I left the beach euphoric, the Gulf of Mexico no longer a shape on a map, but instead the cool place with waves that could gently lift you up and leave you with a soggy hat.
In Florida, if you have fair skin, a hat is not just a quaint fashion accessory, but a practical necessity.
I rarely go outside, but even a short time in the sun has been enough to make significant changes to my skin, despite slathering on gobs of sunscreen.
“Are you staring at your arm freckles again?” Donnie asks.
“This is not my arm,” I say. “Someone stole my realarm when I was sleeping and replaced it with this one.”
“In Florida, you’re goingto be a ginger. Accept it.”
Other differences between my hometown and Florida are cultural. With a large Hispanic population, Florida has Spanish signs everywhere, especially in restaurants and grocery stores. The inability to speak Spanish can cause real problems.
I was eating at a Mexican restaurant, and an elderly lady sitting near us leaned toward me with a kind smile, said something in Spanish, and then looked at me expectantly.
Having only taken French, I could only give her a blank stare. Donnie who has studied Spanish rescued me by explaining to her that he only knew a little Spanish. She smiled and nodded but it all left me feeling unsatisfied.
As a result, I have been teaching myself Spanish, using an interactive course on my Android.
Though I like having a practical incentive to learn new things, there is a drawback to living here that has nothing to do with Florida itself: I miss my family, who are ten hours away by car. The last time I saw them was four months ago when I moved here.
But overall, my experience here has been good. Like every place, Florida has disadvantages but it is a hard place not to love.
In addition, I now have health insurance for the first time since I was in college.
I still miss my house in SC sometimes and I regret that the place where I lived for so long and have had so many memories is no longer part of my life.
But a house is ultimately just a thing and the experience of living in a new place inspires my writing.
Sometimes, though, I feel as though I left a part of myself back in SC, and it wants to pull the rest of me back, as if my Florida experience were only a long vacation, or a dream, that will end at any minute.
Sometimes, though, I feel as though I left a part of myself back in SC, and it wants to pull the rest of me back, as if my Florida experience were only a long vacation, or a dream, that will end at any minute.
Slowly, though, Florida is starting to seem like more than a vacation. I went out of town last weekend and came back to Ocala exhausted. I set my luggage down with a sigh, sank into the recliner, looked around, and saw the Crayola-blue Ocala sky coming through the cathedral window.
Far away, beneath a different part of the same sky, my old house was still there, a relic from my former life, but I was here now, and here was not a bad place to be.
My cat leaped into my lap and I reclined, suddenly glad to be home.