Dusk
It's funny how no matter where I go or what I do nothing feels as much like home as dusk on a cool, clear night in Florida out in some broad pasture with the frogs and the crickets and the orange blossoms and palmettos.
Dad and I went out tonight to visit Fred and Mr. Steward. Fred is a longtime friend of my dad's and he loves to tell stories and his family homesteaded in Arcadia generations ago. He's a tinker and an inventor and he has cars and tractors and farm implements and rusting antiques strewn across his property. His two lady German Shepherds follow him everywhere and they love to have oranges thrown for fetching. He lets me come out and take pictures whenever I want and I don't go out there enough. But we went out tonight and he and dad had Budweisers and I climbed over the barbed wire and took pictures while they visited. He showed me a big steel rake he welded for his front-end loader and his generator and some salvaged steel supports from the old Arcadia water tower, rivets the size of lemons, that will soon become a small steel bridge to cross a stream. He's been working on clearing a piece of land out on Kings Highway and he says there's an old homestead site on it where he's been finding glass bottles. I want to go out and dig some up.
Then we went across the street to Mr. Steward's because Dad's gonna be his tax man starting this year and he also happens to have a nice big organic garden - it's his hobby and his retirement plan and so we went out to see it and he came outta the house with his Wranglers and his big mustache and Cane the dog and he flipped out his knife and started harvesting lettuce and broccoli and potatoes for us to take home. Hurricane Charley took the roof off his house but they put a new one back on, him and some carpenter friends, and he's slowly rebuilding the entire thing. We stood out on the porch watching the sunset and drinking more Budweisers and he talked about his plans to get out of the citrus business and expand the garden and try some new techniques and start a CSA, and his seaweed fertilizers and his horse supplements and the cypress trees he's putting in out back and the wetlands and the grove, still recovering post-hurricane, and his wife, the daughter of my old choir director, who gets out and helps sometimes but maybe worries a little too much about the weeds.
Drove home with burrs on my jeans and a couple of decent pictures and a head buzzing full of ideas. Sometimes I think that amazing things could happen here, that maybe they already are.