We called them “Florida Clouds” when I was a girl in Fort Lauderdale in 1968, huge billowing white balls of humidity spun up into tall skyscrapers that would march east from the Everglades in a late afternoon, exhausting themselves in heavy sheets of liquid pelting my bedroom windows. I was among them again today as my plane climbed into the sky leaving south Florida through the ghostlike wonders, childhood memories close as I flew through narrow canyons carved between mountains of white.
My father came home early one day in my junior year of high school to tell us he was moving the family to Boston. I left behind my sweet, doting boyfriend and my rat pack of girlfriends uniformly attired in extra-large BVD men’s tees with only bathing suits underneath, never again to taste the world’s best French fries from the locally owned Apothecary Shop or to steal puffs from lit cigarettes gladly offered by the older boys at the beach on Saturday afternoons.
I have returned here often, but rarely voluntarily. As a child, the beach stretched long and clean and safe, overrun one week a year with college kids who broke up the monotonous ebb and flow of the sleepy shoreline town just up a way from Miami on State Road 7. That Ft. Lauderdale died years ago, and now discontent, lost dreams and hopelessness oozes up from gridlocked burning macadam.
A decade later, I returned with my husband over and over again to care for my mother-in-law who suffered from Alzheimer’s until I finally came to loathe the place, the very place that had once loved me and raised me and then had washed away with the tide.
This week I returned again to help bury my cousin’s son, just shy of age 20, so young still, so innocent, who drowned in this place in a dark canal in the dead of night. I watched the strip of beach fall away from 17,000 feet and wondered what thing might next bring me back.
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One of the many things that attracted me to Southwest Florida (I'm from Long Island) was the sky. It's BIG, expansive and it's populated with these towering shapes that turn amazing colors come sunset.
ReplyDeleteErin