Welcome to My Old Florida

Finally, after more than three years of talking about this site I am ready to launch it. For those who have listened to me talk about it all this time, thanks for listening and thanks for all your good advice.

I grew up in Florida, in Gainesville, and spent my childhood looking for shark's teeth in Hogtown Creek and camping on the Suwannee River. We fished in the lakes and rivers in our Chris Craft and sometimes roared out the mouth of the river into the Gulf of Mexico where we once threw a prop and were stranded on the shallow sandbar. 

My father stood waist deep in the Gulf as the tide began to rise and he repeatedly slipped under the boat, holding his breath while he managed to get a new prop on the motor. My mother and I held our breath when he did. Just in the nick of time, or so it seemed to me, he got it fixed and pulled himself into the boat, shaking water all over us and laughing. 

We went back up the river, probably to Clay Landing or maybe Fowler's Bluff and by dark were sitting by a campfire, safe from the grabbing fingers of the sea. Were we in any real danger? I thought so. I imagined floating out to sea, pulled far from sight of land with no way to get home. 

Turns out, getting home is what it's always about in one way or another and that's what this site is about for me — a way to get home to the place (real or remembered) where my heart beats to the same rhythm as the land and water around me.