About Florida

"All of life is in one drop of the ocean waiting to go home, just waiting to go home." -Jack Johnson, "Monsoon"

When I was a child growing up on the gulf coast of south Florida, about five years old, young enough to still be living in the first house I can remember, a pretty brown house with dark green carpet, with a fence in the back yard holding back berries and horses, built on a mostly wooded cul-de-sac full of racoons whose eyes would reflect our flashlights at nighttime, their glares filling me with fear, and pygmy rattlers which my dad routinely killed with a shovel, and alligators, one of which ventured out of the lake to lurk underneath the neighbor’s car, inhibiting her ability to leave for work on time; I smuggled a bucket full of live clams home from a nearby island and hid them in the garage. I had no plans beyond that, except to visit them later. When they died, the stench was abominable. My dad searched the garage for a dead rodent. When the clams were discovered, I was in trouble, having been told at the beach that no, we cannot keep the clams as pets or remove them whatsoever from their home in the packed wet sand at the edge of the water, where the lavenders, pinks and grays of their shells flipped over suddenly after each wave as they dug furiously for cover, tickling my feet and catching my eyes, compelling me to lurch forward and scoop them up before they disappeared. At first, a closer examination was enough for me before releasing them, but then I began to feel attached to them. I started filling my plastic bucket. Perhaps my baby brother distracted my parents and that’s how I transported them home undetected. I can’t recall my punishment, but I never repeated the offense. Maybe it was punishment enough to understand that I’d killed all my clams.

Florida was not home for my parents, my dad having been called for ministry by a church there, but they loved that first house and so did I. I was given my first puppy in that house by a kind older gentleman at the church, a tiny poodle. When I was six, my parents sold the house and we moved to an apartment, and I cried bitterly in the car the final time we drove away. Life went on in the apartment and then in two more houses and I grew up as many things. I wrote my first story at age seven and made it into a little paper book complete with pictures. Extremely self-conscious about my scrawny legs, I wore long blue jeans to AWANA, even in the tropical heat. My brother and I played street hockey, kickball and baseball with neighborhood friends; my dad spray painted blue kickball bases on the street and pitched for us. We also played in a nearby ditch, a magical place where one day, hundreds of tiny toads, the size of a penny or a dime, appeared at once and I brought dozens of them home in a plastic gallon jug to release them again. They fared better than the clams. For a while, our yard was loud with their croaking. I stuffed worms into my pockets at inconvenient moments and was made to wash up and change clothes, and at the middle school campus where our church met, I caught enormous green grasshoppers. They were beautiful. I spent hours drawing different versions of my dream house, including the property, the landscaping and amenities like swimming pools and swings, or I spent hours stringing seed beads into colorful bracelets and rings. I popped the Encarta CD-ROM into the computer, looked up different sea animals and wrote reports about them. Sometimes I wouldn’t emerge from my room because I was reading. At thirteen, I took the cordless phone and climbed high up into the mango tree in the back yard to talk to a boyfriend, surrounded by half eaten mangoes still on their branches, feasted on by the squirrels before they could be picked by us. I learned how to dry my hair, despite the humidity, and experimented with drug store makeup until, for my seventeenth birthday, my mom took me to a Clinique counter for the real thing. I went through a mismatched bikini phase, because matching tops and bottoms were for tourists, but I carefully avoided the scrutiny of church leaders by wearing one-piece swimsuits at youth camp. One day after my soccer game, my mom lovingly cornered me to find out what was wrong, so I released my complaints to her about the topics covered during the girls’ youth ministry event that took place the night before, the worst of which I’d locked myself in a bathroom to avoid. She had a chat with the leaders, and after that, I was no longer required to participate in that particular ministry, so I quietly didn’t. I loved Jack Johnson and Ben Gibbard, and one day my friend and I looked up from our food at the Taco Bell near the interstate to notice the band Mae was sitting there eating too, and we greeted them and bashfully explained our fanhood. I developed my photos in the darkroom at school and cleaned the darkroom after school for service hours. I wrote an extended essay on Sebastião Salgado only to forget most of it immediately. I read extensively and then I went for long runs, too long. I got my IB diploma, and I left for Florida State.

I felt no inclination to visit my hometown even before it was ravaged by a hurricane over a year and a half ago. I have no family there and most friends moved other places. The truth is I love where I live now, moving here was like a salve or a respite, and I have no desire to go elsewhere. Moving houses early in life, even within the same town, prepared my sentimental heart well for the future, but that’s not to say that attachment is always wrong. By now, any painful attachment to Florida has been released like the baby toads. Watching the news coverage of the storm surge and the death toll was surreal and horrible, but I didn’t cry. Receiving bleak reports from childhood friends who went back to see for themselves was also surreal and horrible, but I still didn’t cry. To this day, I haven’t cried. My mom said she cried at the footage, particularly of the island where, as a child, I picked up clams; where she was a young married woman and where her children grew up. There’s comfort in believing that things are as we remember them and could be visited casually if we wished, but the hurricane shattered that presumption. Some dear friends of my parents had to swim from their house to a rescue boat, the husband holding the wife. They were saved and their flooded house, their house which had been a fixture when I was growing up, a constant geographical point in my mind’s compass, was repaired, slowly. Many years ago, that same man who carried his wife to the boat offered me a job that would’ve allowed me to move back there. The offer came shortly after I’d emerged from the throes of painful attachment to that place, but long enough afterward that I’d already accepted a job offer in South Korea. I was grateful for his kindness and could not begin to know what the next months would mean, but I still understood viscerally, quietly, by the absolute grace of God, that for me to indulge that old attachment at that moment would have been like killing the clams.

Glorious ditch