Second Hand, Second Thoughts

No, there's nothing very old here in Florida. And yes, it drives me nuts. When I moved here in 1993, it felt like moving to the bottom of the universe--the far flung place where nothing happened--the place where people came to get away from places where stuff happened. It took me years to look at it a slightly different perspective. In fact, it is the top of an entirely different universe--the quiet apex of the Caribbean, the top wisp of South American continent, rather than the dragging, soggy tail of the Northern one. Turning to this different point of view, Ecuador is closer than Ames, Iowa, and Lake Titicaca is no more remote and exotic than Lake Superior. It is cheaper and easier for me to travel to places that previously seemed outrageously beyond: Colombia, Trinidad, Lima--than to Chicago, Cincinnati, Hartford. And, in fact, geologically speaking, Florida truly is the New World, having really only just raised itself out of the water a few relative moments ago by the sheer in...

It's no secret that I hate living in Florida. I hate the sand and the heat and the weird, plasticky texture of the grass that reminds me of those welcome mats with the little daisy in the upper right hand corner. I hate mowing the lawn on Christmas Eve. And above all, I hate that, with the exception of a few fairly impressive shell mounds piled up from Calusa clambakes, there's nothing very old here at all. An "older home," is a Florida real estate-y term applied to any dwelling that was built before 1999. I say, as a general rule--with the exception of tents--no one should ever use the term "older home" if the residents are older than the home. New buildings are made to look old here: Spanish colonial villas; Italian Mediterranean pallazzos and French provincial chateaux; Florida cracker-style stripmalls; Queen Ann style beach cottages done up with more lace and rick-rack than a maiden great auntie. But there's something amiss in these nostalgic archite...