Five Anti-Favorites: On Living in Florida

I'm acting as anti-Hallie here...giving you not 5 Favorites, but 5 Least Favorites - of living in the Sunshine State.

Because it's May and the high has hit 90 for three days in a row.

As most of you know, I grew up in Florida. I'm a Cracker. Being raised here is a unique experience: I saw snow for the first time when I was twelve. The term 'skiing' is associated in my head with bathing suits, not snow suits. In high school, I sported permatan - mostly from walking to class in my outdoor high school (think like an outdoor mall).

Now, as an adult who's come home, I'm finding a whole new - more challenging - aspects to Florida living. Granted, I am still pleased about many aspects - we really only needs one season in our wardrobes, we can go to the beach more or less every day of the year, I could still have permatan if I wanted to - but now there are other things that make living in the sunshine state uniquely painful.

1. Serious weather (weather-related wardrobe) envy. Every year, round about September, we have to endure articles, magazines, Facebook posts, ecetera about impending Fall weather. Pumpkin everything! Leggings and boots! Sweater weather! Hot cocoa recipes!
Yeah, throw all that on your cozy log fires because we live in hot hot paradise. There will be no fall chill in the air or beautiful changing leaves! No snow! Piles of lovely plaid blankets are useless here, as are all those dang songs about letting it snow. And Halloween costumes?  There's a reason I went as a belly dancer for several scandalous years - no, I wasn't a junior Mata Hari, but just a very heat sensitive tween.

2. Insane bugs. I joked about roaches the other day, but they are no joke. In Florida, our bugs are so big they have faces. We have grasshoppers the size of locusts. Palmetto bugs (I can't bring myself to link; they are huge roaches that fly). Rats that live in palm trees. Fire ants - or worse. The thing about these bugs is that everyone has them - they're not a dirty house thing, or an old house thing. They're a Florida thing. If you don't want to shell out serious bucks to have some dude in a hazmat suit come to your place and spray toxic chemicals around, then yes, you will have to make peace with finding roaches in your dishwashers several times a week.

3. Seatbelts of death. You know how you jump in your car during wintertime and quickly turn it on, revving up those great seat warmers if you have them, waiting for the heat to toast your buns? Well, imagine you left those seat warmers on high with your car in the baking sun, maybe on the actual sun, for like a week and then got in wearing shorts and a tank top.
That's what it feels to get in your car in Florida 11 months out of the year. God help you if you have children, because they will - from the time they can talk! - shriek "HOT HOT" every time they get in the car, and make you feel like a horrible parent.

4. Insane humidity. I'm not even complaining for the sake of my hair (who pleads its own case every time we walk out of the house without professional styling). I'm complaining for the sake of anything that is supposed to be outside - patio furniture, hammocks, the siding on your house. Apparently, one of the benefits to living in Florida is all this outside time you're supposed to get. Well, everything you want to sit on outside has mold on it, or if it's a cushion, has a general spongy wetness that seeps up and onto your legs and behind.
Also, on the days where it is actually below 80 and breezy, you want to leave your house open, right? We do that (mostly because we are always trying to save on AC costs) and now one of my chores is scrubbing mold off of our TILE and the backs of our dining room chairs and oh yes, all of the 10,000 books we academics own.

5. Bikini-ready, 24/7. I probably didn't think about this in high school when I was, for the most part, bikini-ready 24/7 (because back then I didn't know Jesus or a swim burqas). But Florida is full of exercise buffs, who are always outside in the blasted heat keeping themselves ready to prance around half naked. It's more like a state of perpetual paranoia for me, where I realize that at any moment I could be asked to show up somewhere in my bathing suit - and I ponder the condition of all of my body parts that I must either bare to the sun or squeeze into lycra.
Sometimes, I just long for the comfort - and converge - of a snowsuit.

So to those of you in Minnesota who just got snow at the end of April, I am sorry. But at least you don't have to worry about shaving every day of your life.

Somewhere Far Away, and Beautiful

I grew up in a suburb of Orlando, called Windermere. Now home to Shaq and Tiger Woods, when I was growing up it was a little place surrounded by orange groves, with the only grocery stores being a Goodings (20 minutes away) or a Piggly Wiggly (also 20 minutes away, but in the opposite direction). Windermere is surrounded by lakes (its town motto is "among the lakes" because it is situated on the Butler chain of lakes), and for the large part it's best vistas look like this:

It is lovely and sweet. Although just minutes away from the back door of Disney, it feels secluded. A 30 mph speed limit the whole way makes it feel even more like just a quiet small town, and nothing at all like the concrete jungle one encounters on I-Drive or similar tourist areas, just minutes away. Growing up, my favorite thing to do was just stand in my front drive way at twilight, smelling the orange blossoms and feeling the evening breeze - maybe catch a glimpse of the herons flying back home to the lakes, or hear the owls in our pine trees. I was never far from beauty. 

I cannot forget the "queer ache" (Anne Shirley) that always arose in my heart whenever I beheld a scene too beautiful for my heart to hold. It was all so glorious and I wanted to enter it more fully, live in it somehow more completely, be a total part of it. I wanted it to never leave me, to never again look upon anything base or ugly, busy or concrete. Only this - this ethereal glory that was all around me but evading me entirely. On family vacation in Tennessee, on the Ocoee river, I thought for sure I would never leave. I would stay there, become a water nymph and live in the swirling tides of the river, forever. 

The cabin we stayed in, Welcome Valley Village, in Tennessee

I was young then, but it hasn't ever really left me - left to a life of too much reading, and plenty of time to wander across hill and dale, I have often felt most myself in those places wild and beautiful, far away from any city. I do not know how to reconcile this now, living in a city that once was jungle but is now given over entirely to those seeking the early bird special and a quick view of the sunset before getting home and turning in for the night. It is not big enough to have a skyline or old enough to have charming squares, and so avoids any urban appeal, but it is not small enough to have the benefit of mostly local places to shop or congregate, and so avoids any small town charm. I often feel sad for it, and its lack of beauty. 

At times I feel like the sprite in Disney's Fantasia 2000, in the first part of the Firebird Suite scene: beset upon and downtrodden by forces out of my control, that destroy so much of what I love. I am a native Floridian, and grew up in areas that were mostly orange groves or swamps. Even Disney, for all everyone harangues it, has actually left thousands of acres of its land to be wetlands. On Disney back property, the large majority of it is green space.  But what is there here? Chain restaurants and strip malls? How can I raise a child here - where will they learn of beauty, where will they spend those golden hours of sunrise and the blue of twilight? 

A fairy tent, in the nature preserve by our house 

And in all this sorrow and frustration, I glimpse my role in creation. I realize why I am doing my meagre pallet garden, why I have planted azaleas by my front porch, and why I am fighting the grasshoppers that threaten to chomp my mint to nothing. I have long wanted to join myself to the beauty of the world and now I can try, little by little, to do so by improving my own little plot of land. It's such a small offering, but I can make it. There is beauty here, even if we have to seek it out more than I had imagined. Even if I can't live somewhere far away, in a sweet country town or a charming big city, I can find beauty here - or else, create it. 

Wherein L'Orangerie Begins to Take Shape (in my mind)

I have come to the realization these days that the entire concept of gardening as a "hobby" is a total racket. Big garden stores (Lowes, Home Depot, Wal-Mart) hope that you'll want to do something outdoorsy when the weather turns nice and so you'll decide to do some planting. You'll come to their store and drop around $100 on soil, pretty plants, some new gloves since your old ones are lost or infested with roaches...and then you'll think about how nice it all looks. Maybe a little later you read an article on a pallet garden or a square foot garden and so you go out and buy everything you need for that (maybe another $100, more or less). But as life goes on and you get busy with the things that you have to do, you forget about your efforts except for sporadic watering and by the time winter comes around, everything is dead or overgrown and ugly. So you take it all out and bemoan your lack of gardening skills because "everything I try to grow dies!"

Pallet garden from Life on the Balcony

Maybe you even try to get MORE serious about it - you actually read the labels on the plants that say whether they grow in sun or shade, try to water more regularly, get some books on gardening. More money to major retailers and still more things wither and die. At one point, you get a red hair to self-sustain your family and grow a vegetable garden, but nothing much comes out of it- not even your raised beds! 

Here's my theory: this is a scam. The more I have gotten into gardening over the past two months, the more I have realized that: a) garden centers (even most local ones) are not your friend, and b) gardening is actually a science called horticulture. I went to my local garden center (read: non-chain!) and saw a HUGE display of beautiful hydrangeas.  I was thrilled, since I love them so much but had thought they could not grow into Zone 11. 

I asked one of their friendly knowledgeable salespeople if this was some new hybrid that could withstand the heat and thrive despite the cold snap hydrangeas usually need. "No," she said. I must've looked confused because she continued "we just sell 'em to people who want the color." My look deepened. "They won't last more than two weeks. Even in a pot." This was not the first nor the last incident that has put me on my guard! I have come to realize that garden centers do not sell what will grow in your zone or area; they don't care if you are buying plants that will die. They will mislabel and sell you plants that cannot grow where you are, but not tell you; so you'll probably blame yourself and come spend more money at their store. 

I am lucky in that my natural suspicious nature made me catch onto this fairly quickly...also I listen to my mother, who knows a lot about gardening in Florida (albeit in Zone 10, which makes a BIG difference!). So I decided I would do what any consummate academic would do and read some books on the subject before I made any big big purchases. Well...even as I'm reading the books about gardening in SW Florida, I'm finding them hard to understand. What is "pinching back" a plant? What does it mean to prune severely versus drastically? As I did more research, I realized that these terms are actually heavily-laden with a meaning and understanding that evades me, the novice gardener. Which is when it hit me: gardening is a science. No one would approach any other branch of science and expect to intuit the right answers as a side-hobby! But we assume that gardening should be something we can just figure out - nevermind soil pH, heat zone maps or those other pesky details! We should be able to shove something in the ground and make it grow! Hm. Not so much. 

A working farm by Louise Magno 

Turns out there's a reason why people used to starve to death back when we were a largely agricultural society - growing things is not necessarily easy. It takes planning and thought, and usually an outlay of money, especially if you live in Florida where the soil is more like sand. So although L'Orangerie is a ways away from where I want it to be, it's nice to be erecting the support of the garden. On Monday the tree crew comes to take down several problem trees (like the palm that is leaning on my house) and clear out some invasive potato vine. From there, I can hopefully start tilling and enriching the soil! Only then can I plant, but it'll be just in time for spring and I hope it'll start moving more quickly then. 

Happy feast day of St. Hilarious!