I am not a hot weather person, nor a beach person, but the ocean compels me. We were in Jacksonville, Florida last weekend to attend a memorial service for J's Uncle Anwar, who died a few months ago at 99. It was a family reunion as well, with cousins gathering from Texas, Toronto, D.C., Indiana, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, other parts of Florida, and, of course, Montreal.
The place where Anwar and MaryAnne have always lived is the opposite of the dazzling brightness of the white beaches that stretch along Florida's Atlantic coast. Just a few miles away, their property forms a long rectangle stretching away from its frontage on the St. John's River. When you turn into the driveway from Atlantic Boulevard, which, as its name implies, runs straight from Jacksonville to the ocean, you enter a perpendicular world: palms and palmettos, small cabins in overgrown wilderness, enormous live oaks dripping with Spanish moss, the deep green punctuated only by the occasional bright gold of a kumquat or orange hanging on a low tree. We get out of the car to a deafening buzz of insects, tiny lizards scatter into the underbrush, feral cats slink behind boxes, their eyes glinting from the shadows.
For me, Florida is never its highways, cities, and endless suburbs, but rather the blinding, bright limitlessness of the ocean, and the dark Gothic of the old deep south: frighteningly unfamiliar, fascinating, bewitching; temperamental and changeable; enigmatic and slow. I am never there long enough to understand anything, and always leave with the echoing, dismissive words of one tenant, to whom we were introduced over a papaya plant, as thirty cats sat at a distance waiting for their evening handout: "Oh: Northerners."
