Cross Creek, Florida

When I moved to Florida 30 years ago, I assumed that I’d be surrounded by palm trees, flamingos, and people with their clothes half off. Nervously, I hunted up my yellow velvet hot pants, the ones my husband gave me on our anniversary in 1968. I’d moved those hot pants from place to place, thinking that if I could ever fit into them again, they’d be the definitive measurement of my having fully recovered from childbirth.

But I found that I not only “couldn’t and wouldn’t,” but that in Florida, worrying about a proper wardrobe is about as useful as putting mascara on a raccoon. Simply, there are no cliques here. There are not enough people of any one stripe to fit in with. Name any place on the planet, and you will find someone here from there. Which means that our diversity makes us not only hypertolerant but also quick to sharpen our devilish sense of humor. Hasn’t every comedy written since Shakespeare put two vastly different people in one space to see what happens?

So here we are -- living in a carnival culture that weds Mickey Mouse with space capsules, gummed-up elections with a history that includes Thomas Edison, Ernest Hemingway, and the inventor of the ice machine. In my opinion, we’re America in a kaleidoscope.

Furthermore, my wrong assumptions are proof that Florida is more than what one thinks of when hearing the name. This is no more in evidence than in North Central Florida, where my husband’s work moved us.

That first summer in my little house under pine trees surrounded by flowering jasmine, I began to feel echoes of my childhood in the Mississippi River Delta. Meandering down dirt roads into woods of oak hammock gave me a sense of being “in place.” The topography of North Central Florida is so reminiscent of Georgia and South Carolina that it’s as if they dripped a little of themselves beyond where someone drew the state lines.

In passing old tobacco barns, I heard whispered 1950s reminders. But it was not until my 7-year-old son was bitten with an itch to fish that I entered an enchanted world beyond my experience and assumptions.

He and I partnered up in a love search that now seems inevitable. He for fish; me for those who revere the written word and tie their souls to it. I had not yet written my first novel but knew I would. And so here we went -- my son and I -- I with him to the Cross Creek Fish Camp, where I sat on the back porch while he dropped a line, and then he with me to the home that is now a state park, where Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings wrote the 1938 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Yearling.