Florida Girl
“That’s where we used to live,” Mom says from the driver’s seat of the rental car.
I look out the window.
My childhood home has been demolished. Well, one of my childhood homes. I had many, growing up with a parent in the military, and none of them mean as much to me as anyone else’s childhood home means to them. Because, when you think about it, what the hell do you call a house you lived in from ages four to seven? You barely remember it. You remember the vague, Pepto-Bismol pink of the bedroom you shared with your sister. The bunk beds you both fell off of numerous times. The trampoline in the backyard that Santa dropped off one Christmas. And that’s really all.
But this isn’t the house I barely remember. The house I barely remember was squat, one story, with ivy plants climbing up the outside and obscuring the brick like some fairy tale cottage. It looked like the new owners had catapulted an enormous orange box onto the property, crushing the old house in favor of this garish new three-story concrete monster. And even feeling not particularly sentimental, there was something so ugly about that replacement house. Maybe it was, initially, a purely aesthetic distaste. But it struck something in me — something about the tangible evidence of my childhood disappearing, like footprints in the sand being washed away.
I used to dig my feet into the sand on the marshy riverbank just across from that house. It’s an ancient river which flows from a place called the Green Swamp. I’d walk home after school, swinging my lunchbox, in my Mary Janes and ruffled socks, past the willows dripping with Spanish moss. I’d crouch down, careful to keep myself steady on the half-rotted wooden planks that jutted out over the water.
The river teemed with life. Old craggy tree roots jutted up from the shallow parts, where fleshy slugs would rest, free from the gaping, hungry mouths of the bluegill swimming below. Out further, graceful alligator ridges sliced through the water, a silent reminder to keep my distance. Soft, swirling gardens of algae clung the edge of the river; swarms of black tadpoles wriggled in and out of this underwater forest, and I was fascinated by them.
I sat there for as long as my childlike attention span could stand it. Then, I removed my backpack and unzipped it, rooting around for a moment before drawing out my prize possession — a butterfly net. I dipped the net into the water in one practiced swoop, scooping up as many tadpoles as I could before raising it back up in the air. And there it was — a writhing, dripping, squirming black clump of delicate little creatures that looked more like animated punctuation than they did frogs. By that point I knew better than to run home and grab a bucket to put them in. I never kept a tadpole alive long enough for it to grow up. Not one.
When the tide was low, I’d leap down and crawl beneath the dock to stare at the hollow armies of insect exoskeletons clinging to the underbelly of the wood. They were empty, fragile, and numerous. I was afraid to touch them. I imagined crushing one would be like stepping on a potato chip. I imagined they would one day light up, and a tumultuous, inescapable buzz would fill the air like the hum of a long-dead choir. I dreamed they crowded my windows as I slept, aching to find some crack in the glass, longing to touch me, to cling on to my body like they clung to the rotten wood.
My grandparents owned a blueberry farm not too far down the road; they had five large bull mastiff dogs and acres upon acres of blueberry bushes. I’d run out as far as I could to the edge of the property, where the fence looked out onto another plot of land, onto another dilapidated house with a screened-in porch and a box TV in the window. Out at the edges of the farm it was all dry, scratchy, untamed. Nailed to the slim tree trunks were metal signs with red block lettering: “TRESPASSERS BEWARE.” A little cartoon handgun punctuated the warning.
After it rained, pools of water would collect in the thumbprints of the earth, and by morning I’d wake up and see the mosquito eggs lining the edges of the puddles. It was my job to take a broom out of Papa’s shed and run around the farm, disrupting mosquito breeding grounds and knocking over pails of fresh rainwater teeming with wrigglers. I was at once fascinated and repulsed by the mosquito larvae, disgusted but unable to tear my eyes away. I wondered if the mother mosquito would know what had happened to all her babies. If she’d come buzzing home, brimming with fresh blood for dinner, only to discover her home had been destroyed.
“It looks ugly,” I say, more in the direction of the new house than my mom. I look down at my hands. I’m not sure how to reconcile my memory of this place with the reality of it. There’s no proof it ever really existed in the first place.
“It’s not how I would’ve done it,” she agrees with me, placidly, almost absent-mindedly. We sit there for a moment, taking in how utterly different it is than our old home. For just a moment, I feel the tiniest pang of loss. One of the Xes on the roadmap of my life has vanished.
Mom twists the key in the ignition. We move on.
“Look, out that way,” Mom says, pointing toward the passenger seat window. I turn my head; a glimmer of water catches my eye. Moss drips down over an old wooden dock. A gaggle of children dressed in khaki-colored school uniforms group up along the riverbank, pointing to some unseen curiosity beneath the surface. “Remember the river?” she says. It’s still there.
