Childhood Remembrances

Leopard frogs, apple snails, mud snakes, king snakes, blowfish, conga eels, limpkins, sirens, Carolina Anoles, brown skinks, six-lined racerunners, black swamp snakes, the hum of locust on a hot summer afternoon, massive flocks of winter ducks on the Indian River, and eel grass lawns in springs so clear it seems the fish are suspended in air. Stretches of dark green mangrove forests over turquoise water, Elkhorn and Staghorn Coral, oak toads, bob white, an abundance of butterflies, swooping night hawks at dusk, bats overhead on a warm summer’s evening, lightning bugs, the soft colors of a Polyphemus moth, box turtles, a hoard of fiddler crabs scurrying around the pneumatophores of a black mangrove at low tide, gator trout stacked up like firewood around dock pilings on an October morning, brown water snakes nestled around cypress knees, the chorus of frogs after an evening rain, the brilliant blue of the tail of a male sailfin molly, shell crackers bigger than your two hands, spiny lobster clustered around submerged red mangrove roots, lemon sharks cruising over a lush turtle grass turf, spoonbills and reddish egrets on the tidal flats, oak branches covered in Spanish moss, ghost orchards and resurrection fern, picking wild blackberries, a stand of newly emerged blue-flag iris, pitcher plants over a wet prairie. These are among the Florida companions of my youth, companions that are disappearing. And their disappearance rips at my soul.