TO SEE INTRODUCTORY POSTING, JUMP TO "THE FLATLAND ALMANACK."
So I am sick to death for the moment of politics.
This is the most beautiful time of year in North Florida. To be specific, the period between mid to late October and mid-May is the most beautiful time. It's officially autumn, but it isn't like autumn anywhere else. The trees are still green; even the ones that lose their leaves are only just beginning. And the liveoak and the palm trees never do lose their leaves. (North Florida, though most people don't realize it, is covered with trees).
I don't know what makes the difference; maybe the dryer and crisper air and the absence of the heat haze. The sky is such a clear blue. It's such a beautiful time for walking. Even though we don't get the autumn colors (or the falling leaves), we get the leaf mould scent and the woodsy autumn smells.
Most of the photographs in Floridiana Gloriana, my Florida photoblog, were taken between October and the middle of May. Afterwards, you lose that strange radiance and the beautiful light.
I've no time at present to travel, but maybe I'll take a trip to Cedar Key. it's only an hour and a half away, and it's a place where you can enjoy the genuine "Old Florida" atmosphere. There are wonderful restaurants. The cool weather makes me feel like exploring, like getting outside with my camera again.
It also makes me sad. I always dream at this time of year about the past. And that always makes me sad. I've reached the point in my life when I really CAN'T go home again. My mom's still around, thank God, but when I go home it just makes me realize how much the town has changed.
My aunt Julia died on Friday. I still can't process it. I haven't done a very good job of staying in touch with my 12 cousins, but I usually managed to see my aunts and uncles (my late father's brothers and their wives) when I visited at home. Two Christmases ago Nick and I visited Lancaster and dropped by to see Aunt Julia and Uncle Son. Some of the kids were home as well. She looked really good. She looked the same as she always did. I feel very sad that I never got to see her again and that I wasn't able to leave here in time to get to the funeral.
When I think of Lancaster, I think now of people who aren't there anymore. I think of the whole milltown culture, which is also gone and which I couldn't wait to get away from when I was growing up there. The old cotton mill---once the largest cotton mill in the world under one roof----has been torn down; all the work has been outsourced to Brazil. People in South Carolina are seriously suffering from unemployment. My mom says that a lot of them are going back to farming. Hard to see how they are going to manage that, now that my hometown (Lancaster, South Carolina) has basically become a suburb of Charlotte, North Carolina.
It makes me miss my dad, an old-fashioned hometown booster and for many years the only optometrist ("eye doctor") in town. He was heavily involved in the local Rotary and was an expert in local history. He helped me write a paper on Sherman's March Through the Carolinas that won me an award from the local DAR. There wasn't much left of the town after he tore through there, but the old courthouse---designed by the same architect, Robert Mills, who designed the Washington Monument---and until the eighties, the old jail survived.
That jail was destroyed in a way I don't like to think of and the prisoners who were there died tragically with it. It was a part of the town's culture I don't look back on with any pride, but which I nevertheless feel that I own. You're sort of stuck with the place where you grew up. You didn't choose it and it didn't choose you, but you're part of each other's history.
I wonder what he'd say about the town now. At the town's Bicentenniel, he was instrumental in setting up the ceremonies and such. When he died in 1988, it was standing room only. Most of the people who live in the town now wouldn't ever have heard his name, but when I lived there, everyone knew Dr. Ben.
It was just a small red clay milltown, but at least it had a character of its own. All my autumn dreams take place in the town or in some version of it. I dream about old houses that are long gone and that I always wanted to see inside; and I seem to spend an inordinate amount of time walking up and down Gillsbrook Road and across the old bridge. In my childhood, there was a creek beside a cornfield and when the water rose the bridge would flood. The mother of a childhood acquaintance who used to drive us to school tried to cross the bridge when it was flooded and was killed when she went over the edge.
When I was a kid, I couldn't wait to get out of there. Now that I'm grown up, I wish I could go back just once for a visit and have everyone be where I left them.
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