<![CDATA[My Old Florida - Old Florida Blog]]>Fri, 10 Apr 2020 21:43:50 -0700Weebly<![CDATA[The new kitchen had hot and cold running water!]]>Thu, 29 Dec 2016 23:21:49 GMThttp://myoldflorida.com/old-florida-blog/the-new-kitchen-had-hot-and-cold-running-waterPictureThis was not my grandmother's stove but it's pretty close to how it looked. She could work that stove with such expertise that Julia Child would have been jealous.
After years of the swamp my grandparents decided to move “into town” which meant leaving the tiny settlement of Gulf Hammock with its 200 folks strung out down sand roads that snaked through the woods like fingers caressing the scalp, and heading for a larger place with a few hundred folks, a real grocery store, heck, even a car dealership, and soon to come  fast food, and before long a Walmart just down the road.
 
In the ‘50s they bought a lot from Miz MacKenzie who my mother says had the best penmanship in the county. My grandfather had saved lumber from his earlier house in the Hammock and went to the mill and had new, special knotty pine wood planks cut for the walls. The whole house was wood: frame, floors, walls, ceilings. All of it was good Florida hard pine.
 
The house he built was set up on blocks to let the air circulate underneath and keep away the water if it came to that. There was a small attic space but nothing up there but wiring. There were three bedrooms, one bath, a simple but adequate kitchen for Granny, a small dining room and a big living room.
 
You might think he would have built a bigger kitchen or a fancier one since he doted on her but after a woman cooks year-round on a wood stove in Florida and keeps her leftovers in a screen-fronted wooden cabinet called a safe on the porch and used an actual icebox, switching to an electric stove and refrigerator along with a sink that has hot and cold running water good enough that you can drink is about as much luxury as you can imagine.
 
The wood stove made the trip up to Chiefland and was set up in the kitchen but before long the new stove arrived, gleaming white with four spiral burners that glowed red at the touch of a dial.
PictureIf you were small enough you could bathe in the washtub. Otherwise it was into the big tub and freeze in the winter.
Before this new house they had never had hot water in the house. In the earlier houses it always had to be heated on the stove for washing dishes, washing clothes or washing people.
 
You could bathe in the creek down in the Hammock but mostly only kids did that. Taking a bath required heating a big tub of water on the wood stove and then pouring it into a washtub, a big galvanized tub large enough for a child to sit down in or into the actual bathtub that had only cold water that smelled of sulphur actually plumbed to it.
 
If the weather was chilly the warmth of the water didn’t last long and there was the single kerosene heater in the living room and of course some heat from the wood stove in the kitchen. Baths were meant to be fast and they were. At least if you were a kid you could have the galvanized tub in the living room but once you started with the big old porcelain tub, heat was just a dream. And even a big bucket of water on the stove barely filled a couple of inches in the tub. Add just a dash of cold water, enough to let you get in without scalding, and it was thin comfort getting clean.
 
After they moved, both of my grandparents lived in the Chiefland house until they died. My mother lived there after that. My sister grew up there, went off to college and made a new life in the Orlando area. My mother eventually moved down to my sister’s and the house in Chiefland sat empty and lonely for a number of years.
 
So many memories for all of us in the family reverbrate in the rooms of that house and the long nose-to-tail two-car garage was full of everything you could imagine from jars of old preserves and rusty tools to generations of childhood toys, old magazines and furniture.
 
In the mindset of never throwing anything away that might be of future use, that garage got quite a collection of clothes, lamps, fishing poles and old dishes. It was so packed no one ever wanted to deal with it and honestly, it was so full that it was impossible to walk further than a few feet inside either end.
 
Recently, cleaning out the garage at the house for a new tenant I found a couple of birthday cards from Miz MacKenzie, the woman who sold my grandparents the lot over 70 years ago, and it’s true, they were works of alphabetic art.
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]]><![CDATA[ Recreating the 1800s with the 2016 Great Florida Cattle Drive  ]]>Thu, 24 Mar 2016 19:36:05 GMThttp://myoldflorida.com/old-florida-blog/-recreating-the-1800s-with-the-2016-great-florida-cattle-drive
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The 2016 Great Florida Cattle Drive is over but far from forgotten. After five days, some of them rainy and miserable, the cattle drive ended on January 30 in Kenansville at the Silver Spurs Rodeo Arena. Hundreds of people showed up for the Frolic, the traditional celebration held at the end of cattle drives, to watch the herd arrive. There were singers and artists, barbecue and flags, cupcakes and preteen rodeo queens in jeans and cowboy hats, not fancy dresses or tiaras. At the arena in Kenansville there was a Florida Cracker Camp, historical booths, re-enactors, whip makers and more.Riders came from Parrish and Lutz, Chiefland and Riverview, Newberry and Zolfo Springs. Not big towns, maybe towns you never heard of, but all towns with people who have ties to the state’s colorful past in the cattle industry. Some are still in the business six generations later. About 400 hardy souls came together riding Quarter Horses, Cracker Horses and mules or driving wagons pulled by teams to take part in the cattle drive this year.
The drive is a throwback to the 1800s when cowboys, usually called cow hunters, went into the unfenced scrub to round up cattle and drive them to market.
At this year’s Frolic, high ground was at a premium following a soggy week. Organizers struggled to get the onlookers parked in and around the pickup trucks pulling big horse trailers that were waiting for their riders to arrive.
The herd was a little late getting there which was a good thing since it gave people time to get through the crush of cars trying to make it down the narrow road to the rodeo grounds and find a somewhat dry spot to park the car. People wandered through the muddy fields getting ever closer to the break in the woods where the herd was supposed to appear. And finally, it did. People were so happy that you would have thought everyone in the crowd had a son or daughter or cousin on one of those horses. They waved and applauded and waded further into the mucky ground.
The herd was brought up close to the arena and held there for a while. Riders trotted over to the crowd picked up kids they knew and rode back to the herd, giving the young ones a real thrill. One daddy rode over and got his little girl from his smiling wife and let the tiny tot hold the reins and put dad’s quarter horse through its paces, twirling sharp to the right and then reversing to the left. The little girl seemed delighted though she did drop the reins, accidentally bringing the horse to an abrupt and well-mannered stop.
Other riders showed off their whip-cracking skills, demonstrating where Florida crackers got their nickname. Those on horseback may have dressed like 1850 but the modern day cow hunters, clearly relishing the event, brandished more cameras and cell phones than bull whips.
Days were long, starting at 6 a.m., and filled with making camp, breaking camp, taking care of the horses and riding with the cows. At the end of each day a big tent was set up waiting for them with a hot meal on the table.
Riders from each of the three groups that took turns herding, were introduced and rode into the arena to applause. No one was in a hurry to leave and they hung out for a last chat like people on a date that had gone especially well.
Visitors slowly untangled their cars from the mishmash of parking and made their way back out to the road and down through Kenansville with its old bank building and oddly named Heartbreak Hotel.


The back story of the Cracker Cow
Florida has been very important in the cattle industry and was the first state in the nation to be known for raising cattle. Most people think of Texas or some other western state when they think of cattle and cowboys and chuck wagons but Florida was there first.
Florida’s cow history goes back to the Spanish explorer Ponce de Leon who brought seven head of Andalusian cattle with him in 1521. Each time a Spanish ship set out for the new world it brought settlers, missionaries, soldiers, supplies and more livestock. In the latter category, the Spaniards brought compact Iberian horses to ride and cattle and pigs to eat. By 1700 there was a string of Spanish missions across north Florida and over 30 ranchos had sprung up nearby to manage the livestock. The ranchers started to ship cattle to Cuba for sale, something that would continue for many generations. As the Spanish left, many of the cows and horses were just turned loose to fend for themselves. When the American settlers started to stake their homesteads, they hunted the stray cows themselves and another wave of cattle ranching began. The Seminoles had large herds of Cracker Cows and Spanish horses. It was a big business and in the 10 years following 1868, over 1.6 million cows were shipped out of Florida ports.
Over the next 100 years there were lots of changes. New breeds were brought in and crossbred with the Cracker cattle and finally there were almost none left. But in 1970, sisters Zona Bass and Zetta Hunt, daughters of pioneer cattleman James Durrance, donated five Cracker Cow heifers and a bull to the state to begin a herd to save the breed. Since then several documented authentic herds have been created and in 1988 the Florida Cracker Cattle Association was formed to document and preserve the ancient bloodlines. The Spanish cows brought to Florida are also the ancestors of the Texas Longhorn.
In addition to the cracker cows there are cracker horses, another distinct breed that has been brought back from the brink of extinction and is now thriving. I’ll write about the cracker horse in a separate post. They are beautiful little horses with their own particular gaits. They are derived from the Iberian horse of Spain and are direct cousins to the Marsh Tacky ponies of the mid-Atlantic, the Paso Fino and the Mustangs of the far west. Prior to the arrival of those horses back in the 1500s, there were no horses in America. Oddly, horses may have originated in the Americas and then spread over what is now the Bering Straights to Asia and on to Europe. For whatever reason horses did not survive in the Americas and the last died out about 7600 years ago. Fortunately, 7100 years later the Spaniards brought them back.
Photos from the Cattle Drive
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At the end of the cattle drive, cowboys picked up their children for a ride.
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He certainly got the ribbon for most spots.
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Weeks of rain left the prairie soggy and full of standing water at the end of the cattle drive.
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Riders leading the procession into the arena carried the US and Florida state flags.
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The riders wait to take a turn around the arena at the end of the cattle drive.
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Even the littlest cowboys got a turn on the horses as the group in Kenansville waited for the cattle drive to arrive.
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Some of the gals got done up in their finery for the end of the ride.
​© Copyright 2016: text Sue Harrison; photos Sue Harrison and Lee Brock for MyOldFlorida.com.
]]><![CDATA[The Christmas Tree]]>Sun, 20 Dec 2015 16:31:18 GMThttp://myoldflorida.com/old-florida-blog/the-christmas-tree
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My grandfather and the Christmas tree sometime in the 1970s.
My grandfather liked to cut his own Christmas tree and did for as long as he could. He would start looking a month or so in advance, scouting the woods for that perfect shape and when the time came would go out with an axe and bring it back to the house still smelling of the December damp and chill. 

It is much easier to imagine Christmas and all the traditions like cutting a tree up north where nature tosses in snow and blustery skies to make everyone’s cheeks rosy like the mythical Santa. In the south, in Florida, it’s a little harder to get that same snowman-winter wonderland feeling going. But we have our ways and if this is how you have always known Christmas then this is how Christmas ought to be.

Some years the temperature drops and it’s downright chilly but that never lasts more than a day or so. The chill itself felt like a gift savored but soon gone like a Popsicle in summer.

The tree was an important part of the ritual, building up to people gathering to eat too much turkey, tearing into presents and just being happy to be together. When the tree arrived Granny got out the boxes of decorations. There were long strands of silver tinsel that we put on the tree strand by strand (and after Christmas took off the same way and carefully laid out flat for the next year). Not like now where you see trees with all their tinsel still in place, on the curb awaiting trash pickup.

There were regular lights the size of the bulbs in today’s nightlights and a cherished string of bubble lights that we nursed along for many years. I don’t remember many individual ornaments but we had a few. It was really the warm glow that the lights threw around the room that I recall best.

We had a set of white reindeer and of course I painted one of their noses red with nail polish. I seem to recall a little sled, too.

Under the tree was a white skirt and before long it was nearly covered by mysterious wrapped gifts. My grandmother, who was the most upright and well behaved person otherwise would creep around the tree when she thought no one was looking and find each of her presents. She would handle them and bounce them up and down to get their weight and find out if they rattled. She would run her fingertips over the contours and try to figure what it was. My mother says that Granny would even unwrap and rewrap if she could get away with it and was not above poking around in the closets for gifts not yet wrapped.

Poppa passed away in 1981 and Granny’s last Christmas in 1983 was spent in a hospital in Gainesville after she had been diagnosed with stomach cancer and would only last two weeks. We all came, her two daughters and their families, and took turns staying with her. For Christmas I had gotten her a new cane with an ornate brass handle bought before I knew she would not walk again. She unwrapped it and turned it over in her tired hands and said how pretty it was. She opened all her gifts lying in her hospital bed and exclaimed over them as if they were treasures but it tired her out and she soon slept.

On New Year’s Eve around 6 in the afternoon while my mother and sister were out to grab a bite to eat she closed her eyes a final time and went home.

The natural tree went away and was replaced by the silver one that my mom later kept in a box in the closet. We still gathered and decorated and plotted how to surprise each other and held hands while saying grace over turkey and dressing. We regained our sense of joy but it will always be tempered by the knowledge of those goodbyes.

]]><![CDATA[Swimming in the boil at Manatee Springs]]>Wed, 10 Jun 2015 13:51:51 GMThttp://myoldflorida.com/old-florida-blog/swimming-in-the-boil-at-manatee-springs
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The boil at Manatee Springs can look almost bottomless when you are swimming above it. Photo Donna Brown courtesy Florida State Parks.
PictureThe dock and diving board, possibly in the ‘60s, at Manatee Springs.
When I was growing up Manatee Springs (at the end of SR 320 six miles west of Chiefland) had not yet become a state park like we know it today. It was privately owned until 1954 when the state acquired it for a park but even after that it remained much more informal and relaxed in terms of what you could do and not do.

In the ‘50s there was a boat ramp and a concession stand but the walkway out to the river hadn’t been built yet. Back in the day you could drive your boat right up the spring run to the ramp or even the springs unlike today where motorized traffic is blocked off at the river.

One time we were coming up the run in our little Chris Craft when one of the steering cables snapped and the boat veered over to the right and ran up in the cypress knees. Luckily none of us were hurt and the boat survived with a couple of scrapes in the paint. Daddy fixed the cables and we continued on up into the spring where we tied up and got out to make lunch.

Back then, the pavilions were already in place and local folks had been camping and using the property as a fish camp for quite a while. There was hardly anything better after a hot day swimming in the cold spring than perfect hamburgers cooked on the charcoal grill. Get out of the cold water, wrap your shriveled fingers around that hot juicy burger and take a big bite. There may still not be much better than that.

We were always told to stay away from the nearby water-filled sinkhole now called catfish hotel. Supposedly it was deep and very dangerous. The top was covered by vegetation and the walls went almost straight down to the water. It didn’t take a lot to persuade us to keep our distance. And why go in that nasty looking place when the springs and that beautiful run were just a couple of hundred feet away?

Another favorite thing of mine at Manatee back then were the big vines hanging out of the oak trees. If you couldn’t see yourself as Tarzan or Jane (or maybe Cheetah) you had no imagination. The vines didn’t swing really well but you could climb them and scamper around on the limbs pretending it was your jungle tree house. 

My father used to talk about dynamiting the springs when he was a boy. The idea was to use just enough to stun the fish and make them float to the surface so he and his gang of boys could gather up a mess and have a fish fry. One time, so he told it, they must have used too much because it threw up a huge plume of water and shook the caretaker’s house so bad that it knocked dishes off the shelves. He said the caretaker’s wife was mad as a wet hen about her broken dishes and the boys had no fish fry that night.

Just as an aside, my father said he learned to swim in a nearby sinkhole. He said his own father picked him when he was a small boy and tossed him into the water, saying, “You better swim.” And he did, swim.

Today we would be horrified at the thought of throwing a stick of dynamite into those pristine springs or of tossing a small child into a deep sinkhole but I guess those were different times. I know I was surprised and a little sad when the boat traffic was stopped. But we have a habit of loving things to death and the state parks and their rules keep much of our inappropriate love in check.

When I was older, a teenager, I still wanted to spend the day at Manatee. We would get dropped off in the morning and picked up in the afternoon. My cute distant cousin Richard was a lifeguard and my cousin Betty and I spent a lot of time trying to impress him with our dives, svelte one-piece suits and graceful treading of water. When he went off duty we switched to cannonballs and belly flops. And at some point during the day we’d walk up to the concession stand, wash the sand off our feet and order a Coke and some chips that we would eat, sitting on the cement benches with our feet stretched out in front of us.
PictureManatee Springs, 1958, boats tied up by the boat ramp near the springs.
Manatee Springs got its name from the naturalist William Bartram when he visited it in 1774 and saw a dead manatee on the bank. Manatees still come to this and other springs in cold winters to stay warm in the constant 72-degree water. There is evidence the spring area was used by Native Americans back in the paleo period over 10,000 years ago.

Today the spring flows up from a deep, 75-foot wide, boil that is connected by a network of caves to the nearby catfish hotel (the duckweed covered collapsed sinkhole) and two other smaller sinkholes . The caves go on for miles and if one is certified for cave diving this is a pretty popular spot. In 1994 a world record for length in cave diving was set with a distance traveled of 11,074 feet.

Where the spring comes up in the boil the color is a gorgeous blue caused by the crystal water flowing up in a big white limestone bowl reflecting the light. The 100-plus million gallons of water a day coming up flows into a run that leads out to the Suwannee River. The bottom of the run is mostly covered in waving grasses and the water is so clear that you can see mullet and bass and bream darting in and out or just hanging in the current.

These days you can rent kayaks or canoes from the concessionaire who also offers BBQ with beans and cole slaw. There is a pontoon tour on the Suwannee from the end of the 300 yard boardwalk that follows the spring run out to the river and the floating dock. Boats can no longer come up the run. Fishing is allowed in the run and the river with a fishing license.

There are campsites and ranger led events, 8.5 miles of nature trails for hiking or biking and you can even bring the dog. It’s not as much of a child’s paradise as it once was but it is still a pretty darned nice way to spend a day.

By the way, there are snakes and the occasional gator but this is nature not a theme park. 

This piece first appeared on June 4, 2015 in Levy Living, the ezine of the Nature Coast. 
B&W photos above courtesy State Archives Florida/Florida Memory

]]><![CDATA[ Catching the big mudfish ]]>Fri, 24 Apr 2015 22:54:50 GMThttp://myoldflorida.com/old-florida-blog/-catching-the-big-mudfishPictureJimmy Tucker with the Ga. record mudfish. Photos courtesy bowfinanglersclub.com
They are no good to eat but sure are fun to catch. 

That is what I thought growing up though I have since heard people say they are quite good eating if you clean them right. Their flesh is jelly-like and I was told very bony but supposedly you can cook them up as fish patties, fry them, throw them in a stew or smoke them. But for me it was always about catching them.

The mudfish (Amia Calva) is also known as the bowfin or dogfish. They are fresh water and range throughout the Mississippi, the Gulf Coast and along the Atlantic Coast rivers and streams as far north as New York.

They look like a throwback to an earlier era and they should, they have been around for 180 million years. They breathe air via their swim bladder and when oxygen content in the water is low they just gulp oxygen directly from the air.

They are easy to recognize, they don’t look like any other fish. They are broad across the head like a catfish but the rest of them is unique. They have a long wavy dorsal fin and a paddle-style tail. Their lower fins are much smaller than the dorsal and their heads are smooth. They range from 2 to 5 pounds on average but often go up to 6 or 8 pounds. Anything larger than that is unusual and described as a “lunker.” The state record is a whopping 19.0 pounds according to Florida Fish and Wildlife.

And while most people don’t fish for them, there is even a Bowfin Anglers Group on line today with fishing tips and recipes.

Mudfish bite lures or baitfish and I have even caught them on worms. Guess they were really hungry that day. One thing for sure, everybody agrees they put up a helluva fight and can be mistaken for big bass before they are landed.

When I was a kid and visiting my grandparents in Gulf Hammock I spent a lot of time fishing. Nobody thought anything about letting a young girl go off on her own in the woods with a pole, some bait and probably a peanut butter and jelly sandwich to stave off starvation before supper.

Most of what I caught were sunfish — bream, bluegills, warmouths, shellcrackers and stumpknockers. Hard to say if it was more fun catching them or calling their names. And if I was lucky I might find a small trout or more often a bass. The big gars that floated like half sunk logs in the crystal clear creeks headed for the Waccasassa River almost never bit anything, but the mudfish, sometimes they did and when they did it was fun.

I remember the first big one I caught. I had walked over across US 19 toward the old then-abandoned hotel back in the woods. A creek wandered by the dirt road leading to the hotel and sometimes the water stretched out into the low lying area into shallow black ponds with deep muck bottoms and cypress knees dotting the edges.

I had caught a pretty good mess of bream and saw something big working the water in one of those ponds. I crept over near the edge (didn’t want to lose my shoes to that sucking mud) and started tossing my worm over near where the water was being worked. I’d drag it slowly back toward me (this is a cane pole not a fancy rod and reel) and it requires a delicate touch to entice a fish in a tight area with overhanging limbs and Spanish moss.

On about my third pass something took hold of the worm. It didn’t run, it didn’t do anything. It was just holding it in its mouth. I knew If I tried to set the hook I would probably just pull it out of the mouth and that fish would be gone so I waited. In just a few seconds the fish turned and started to move away with the bait and I hit it hard as it turned, setting the hook in corner of the mouth.

That mudfish pitched a fit. It swam hard and changed direction and bent my pole nearly in half. I thought the line or pole would break and tried to follow it around the edge of the swampy area to tire it out. It flipped around and ran toward me an away and I started to back up every time it headed toward me. Finally it was close to the edge and I picked the tip of my pole up and prayed the line would hold. It did.

That was a big mudfish, though probably not as big as it seemed to me then. After a good long look I took my old slime covered fish rag out and held it down while I worked the hook out.

Some people kill mudfish, they think they eat too many of the fish we like to catch and eat but I just pushed him back toward the water with my toe until he gave a big flap of his tail and got back in. I saw his dorsal fin cutting the shallow water for a few feet and then he was gone, back into the black water and me gone back toward the sunlit creek with a still-pounding heart for a few more bream.

This piece first appeared on April 24, 2015 in Levy Living, the ezine of the Nature Coast. 

Mudfish aka bowfins come in a variety of colors. Here are two showing the basic silver (on the left) and the green coloration found during spawning. 
Photos courtesy bowfinanglersclub.com. 
]]><![CDATA[Doublewide and Cottonmouths]]>Thu, 26 Feb 2015 21:24:22 GMThttp://myoldflorida.com/old-florida-blog/doublewide-and-cottonmouthsPicturePhoto of cottonmouth courtesy Florida Archives.
Many years after the cottonmouth in the creek incident that happened when I was a kid I had another run in with one. I had been living up north and returned to Florida for the winter and was staying in Gainesville.

I had a leather shop on Cape Cod and decided to open one for a few months in Gainesville figuring I could make some cash with all those college students.  Well, I broke all three rules of “location, location, location,” and rented a space in a little strip mall on out beyond the car places off Main Street.

The place was too big so I put up an 8-foot wall down the middle and rented the other side to an Asian grocery. To get my license I had to be inspected and the town told me I couldn’t build a wall without a building permit but I assured them I had in fact built the wall despite the lack of permit and the Japanese folks were quite happy over on their side. After some head scratching they gave me a permit for a temporary wall with the promise that it would be removed when I left in six months and the Japanese people took over the whole space.

Speaking of permits, because I had leather dye I also had to have a metal fireproof cabinet to keep it in. Since I had already built a wooden cabinet I just went to a local newspaper and got some of their old metal printing  sheets (pages in pre-computer newspaper days were printed from thin metal plates and rollers) and wrapped them around the cabinet. More head scratching and I got my permit for that, too.

I did not make much money, doubt if I covered the rent but I did have fun.

While I was in Gainesville that winter I rented a funky doublewide sitting on a couple of acres north of town about a mile off of 441. There was a creek running through part of the lot and plenty of woods. Apparently the previous renter must have been in the pot business because I found a bunch of old aquariums out in the woods, some with a few small pot plants still growing in them.

One day when I was out walking I saw a really big cottonmouth down in the creek trying to eat a good-sized dead catfish. The catfish was stiff and its side fins with nasty spines in them were sticking straight out. The snake would start with the tail of the fish and work his way up to those spines but he could not get them in his mouth. So he’d work back down off the fish and then angle around and start from the head. No luck.

That’s where I left him, chewing on the dead catfish, but I got to thinking he was pretty big and close to the trailer and my dog liked to explore. So I called Fish and Wildlife and they sent a very nice guy out who caught the snake and was going to turn him loose further away from people. The guy warned me that moccasins are very territorial when they have babies and are likely to be aggressive in ways other snakes are not.

Shortly after he left I went back to the creek and unbelievably there was another one, even bigger than the first. I called the Fish and Wildlife guy back and he came over for the second snake. He took his pole with a looped rope on the end and went down in the creek bed and nabbed this one too. The snake was a good five feet, maybe a little more and fat, as big around as his forearm.

“This is one hellacious cottonmouth,” the guy said as he dropped the moccasin into a container in the back of his official pick up. “Call me if you find anymore,” he said as he bounced down my heavily rutted sand driveway.

Luckily I saw no more cottonmouths and before long the winter ended and I headed back north missing Gainesville and sand roads and shadowy lives lived on the edge of town even before the city limit sign disappeared in my rearview mirror.

]]><![CDATA[Keeping the Wood Stove Burning]]>Mon, 05 Jan 2015 21:25:38 GMThttp://myoldflorida.com/old-florida-blog/keeping-the-wood-stove-burning
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This is not our stove but is similar. Big, black and capable of magic when Granny put her hands on it.
PictureGranny in Poppa's hat and shirt in the garden.
On some lucky days my grandmother would bring me a taste of what she was cooking on the cast iron stove that radiated heat like a mini-sun in the kitchen every day of year including the hot Florida summer.

She could work that stove like a fine instrument. There were no controls to speak of, just a damper and a firebox. So all the heat under the burners and in the oven was regulated by adjusting the damper and building the fire or letting it die down.

While she was cooking greens and frying chicken on top she was cooking the fluffiest biscuits imaginable in the oven. If I had been good and gone out looking for blackberries and come back with a batch there might even be a blackberry cobbler in that oven. She would shove pans around on top to cooler or hotter areas and in between would find time to set the table and make the iced tea.

She was first up in the morning and building a fire before the sun peeked over the horizon. Poppa left for work early, sometimes by 5, and got home early, giving him time take care of the garden and the chickens. That meant she had to be up and making the breakfast — bacon, eggs, grits and biscuits — and packing him a lunch.

During the week he ate lunch out in the woods on the job so she was free to do the laundry, weed the garden and clean the house before starting supper. You might say dinner but in those days lunch was called dinner and the evening meal was called supper. For supper there would be meat of some kind, chicken and pork mostly and sometimes venison if hunting had been good. And there were two or three vegetables, most of them from their garden and either rice or potatoes. Dessert was hit or miss, you couldn’t count on a regular dessert but you could always take a biscuit and crumble it up and pour cane syrup on top of it with butter beat into it.

My grandfather liked buttermilk and he’d have a bowl of buttermilk with cornbread broken up into it. I never could get warmed up to that but he surely loved it.

Sometimes now I wonder what Granny liked best. She rarely said and never kept the best of anything for herself, and she always made sure something each of us liked was on the table.

So that stove got busy early and stayed hot most of the day. It was even the way we heated water for baths or to wash the dishes in a big enamel pan in the sink for a long time.

One of my jobs when I was visiting was to cut kindling. That meant going through the woodpile to find pieces filled with rising sap, resin. That wood, sometimes called “lighterd” wood, was nearly orange from the highly flammable sap and sometimes sticky to the touch. It split easily. Just put a piece standing on end on the stump used for cutting wood, tap the axe into the edge, lift and let the weight of the axe just split it right down. You did need to get the pieces pretty small and when you stuck a couple of those in the fire box of the stove with a bit of crumpled paper and a couple of pieces of firewood you would have a nice fire in just a few minutes.

I now see “country” catalogs selling memories or at least a sweet reminder of the past. They offer small stacks of this “fat wood” for sale wrapped in gingham and tucked into handsome little copper buckets to sit by the fireplace. It may start the fire and may have that wonderful smell but I’m pretty sure it is not being cut by scrawny, curly-haired girls like me out behind the weather-beaten house and brought in by the scratchy armload to stack by the stove.

]]><![CDATA[Christmas Shopping for Just the Right Thing]]>Fri, 05 Dec 2014 17:18:58 GMThttp://myoldflorida.com/old-florida-blog/christmas-shopping-for-just-the-right-thing
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Woolworth’s in Gainesville sometime in the 1940s. The store was there well into the 70s and was my first stop for Christmas shopping in the 1950s. Photo courtesy Florida State Archives
PictureChristmas morning with the cousins.
I love Christmas. I like getting and giving presents in equal measure and remember how I would save pennies from my allowance in the ‘50s for months so I could go shopping for Christmas presents.

My mom always gave me a few bucks, maybe as much as five, so I was pretty well set those days. The dime store was always the first choice since it had so many inexpensive things to pick from. Granny got a scarf and she would wear it to church or prayer meeting. Poppa got a pipe, some snuff or some tobacco in a can. Momma got classy rhinestone jewelry and poor Daddy got stuck with socks or on very good years, a new shirt.

There was the occasional bottle of Evening in Paris or Jergens Lotion for the gals and Old Spice or Aqua Velva for the guys stuck under the tree and little delicate figurines that took their place on shelves on Christmas morning. 

As I got older I got better about shopping in odd places for gifts. I would go to the Tackle Box and look for fishing things for Daddy and Poppa and would venture into those nice jewelry stores downtown where one could still get something small but special just a few bucks. Those clerks were very nice to me, a young skinny girl clutching a couple of dollars and looking for the perfect present and they never failed to treat me nicely and let me look at all kinds of things I could not afford.

As a teen I discovered the stationary store and gifts expanded into little notebooks, boxes of writing paper and thank you cards and fancy pens that no one really had any use for or wanted except maybe me.

And one year when I was very young I took one of Poppa’s snuff cans, washed it out and painted it Chinese Red. I can still remember going over to the Commissary in Gulf Hammock and into the far corner where paint and hardware were stocked and picking out that tiny can of Chinese Red enamel paint. I slaved over the can so there was not one brush stroke on it. On Christmas morning you would have thought I’d given him a new car the way he fussed over that red can.

I don’t know what he finally did with it but it was around for years.

Under the tree for me were guns and holsters and sets of plastic cowboys and Indians. One year, the year I had polio and still managed to pass the second grade, I got a real bicycle. And amazingly Santa found us no matter where we went, once even tracking us down in a little trailer in the desert as we trekked from Florida to California for a brief try at life on the other coast.

But the most important thing I got from all that giving and receiving was the lesson about how good it is to show appreciation for what people do for you not because of the thing they give you or its value but because they cared enough to try to make you happy. 

That’s what we all did as a family, over and over, year after year, try to make each other happy. And mostly, we did. 

]]><![CDATA[My Aquarium]]>Mon, 22 Sep 2014 21:11:25 GMThttp://myoldflorida.com/old-florida-blog/my-aquariumPictureHogchoker, photo courtesy of Wikipedia.

The creek, where I shot the moccasin and fished on long hot afternoons, had a few surprises. One was finding tiny flounders. They were anywhere from half an inch to an inch and a half long and really hard to catch. They changed color from pale yellow like the sand seen through the tannin-shaded water to dark brown over by the leaves in the edge. Or, they burrowed under the sand and just disappeared.

Recently I was doing some research trying to find out if being in freshwater is a phase of the saltwater flounder’s life cycle like salmon going up the rivers to spawn but it doesn’t seem to be. They are Trinectes maculates but commonly called hogchokers in the online chat rooms about freshwater fish and no one seems to know much about them. Apparently they are not really flounder but are in the sole family and live their lives in brackish water as far north as the Hudson River in New York. They can also be found many miles up the Mississippi and in most of the Florida rivers leading to the sea.

Back then I didn’t think too much about it, I just liked to catch all kinds of little fish with a dipper or a small scoop net. Sometimes I caught them with my hands. I caught minnows and I caught baby fish that would grow up to be catfish, trout or bass. And naturally I caught the little flounders too.

My grandmother let me take her big blue enameled turkey pan and make an aquarium that I kept on the back porch. I got creek sand and washed it until it was clean and then got a couple of water plants and some rocks from the railroad bed so the little fish would have places to hide. I hauled water from the creek and set it up. Then I caught the fish and put them in.

Now of course I did not have a fancy aerator so I had to add fresh water every day or they would have nothing to breathe. And the water went bad and got to growing algae and stinky things in a couple of days so twice a week I had to catch the fish and put them in a glass while I took everything out and washed it. That meant washing the sand, the rocks, the pan and even the plants. Then it all had to be put back in and the fish carefully added back.

They did hide in the little cave I made for them out of rocks and I could watch them for hours swimming around and coming to the surface where they made little gulping moves.

I don’t remember for sure what I fed them. Maybe crumbs or maybe I actually got some fish food at the store.

At any rate they lived and when summer vacation was over I took them back to the creek and turned them loose. Years later I may have caught them as grown fish and even eaten them, who knows.

]]><![CDATA[Sunrise on Sunrise]]>Thu, 11 Sep 2014 15:51:27 GMThttp://myoldflorida.com/old-florida-blog/sunrise-on-sunrisePictureClouds changing color with the dawn.
Sometimes in the morning, before the sun is up, it’s nice to walk outside and see whose lights are on. Nobody’s music is playing. Those who are up are the early risers not the late go-to-bedders. Maybe a quietly playing TV sheds blue light across the bottom of a curtain but mostly what you see in windows is that warm incandescent yellow. It’s the color campfires throw on faces as you walk back up the darkened trail from the lake and approach it through the trees.

The air outside is blue until the sun steps out and a few clouds begin to shift from inky to pale gray and then are suddenly doused in an almost hot pink glow. Trees are silhouettes and slowly reveal their leaves as the light picks up.

One by one, in no particular order, the streetlights click off and each glows like an ember for about a minute before winking out for the day.

On my quiet side street not far from Sunrise Blvd. people are walking dogs. One guy has an old dog and a young dog. The old dog, a wiry haired golden tan mutt, trails behind and the young dog, a black pit bull mix, pulls ahead, ready for what’s around the next corner. The guy stumbles along in the middle caught between weariness and anticipation.

Another guy has a young dog with one of those fancy new leashes that runs around the dog’s nose. The man seems intent on keeping the dog in the proper dog walking position and he does. The dog would like to wander but he doesn’t.

Bridget, who lives across the street, has had over the years a continual supply of identical (to me) dachshunds and the occasional terrier. The doxies are generally mean natured and will nip you given the chance. They always bark. When she walks the current batch of dogs the terrier, a female Jack, tags along off leash and one of Bridget’s cats has decided to do the morning dog walk and follows about 15 feet behind.

Then there are the two girls with the three chihuahuas. They take turns walking the dogs that are always perky and bouncy and as happy to see this well-trod block as if it were a paradise just revealed for the first time.

Down the way is a woman with a big Doberman and a little lap dog. The woman lives in the new fancy townhouses. The dogs are well-behaved.

Sometimes I sit on the steps with coffee and watch the changing light and dog parade. Sometimes I go out to the street and lean on the car and look off toward the sunrise.

Everyday is a new beginning.

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