G'ville

Yes, I will doubtlessly whine and moan about Florida's humidity, heat, hurricanes and lack of topography. But this is my home, now, so I can more readily share some of the qualities anyone would appreciate here.

It's a small town. True, it's home to a great university with world-class departments in archaeology, geography, history, and medicine, but it's still a tidy village. The streets are laid out sensibly; you wouldn't get lost easily, and you'd appreciate the amenities. One minor example: this is a great ice cream town, several local artisan ice creams. As another, the barbecue is splendid (Florida has a cabinet level position, Secretary of Barbecue). Satchel's Pizza (we'll be there tomorrow evening, a regular Friday night event) is as good as it gets.

The produce, from local truck farms and a long growing season, is bountiful. There are greens and field peas and fresh okra and cuts of meat that don't appear in middle-American supermarkets. The local honey – orangeblossom, saw palmetto, sourwood, and others – is exquisite. If I can persuade some local bakery to produce sourdough bread anywhere near Boudin or Acme quality, this could be a culinary hotspot.

Though it's only an hour and a bit from the coast, the seafood is not inexpensive. Why? A good mystery to pursue. Perhaps a good situation to remedy with rod and reel.

On my last leg of the migration to Gainesville, from Tallahassee, one of the quiet beauties of this new landscape presented itself: the highways cut across low country through unbuildable swamp and wetland in slight, hardly perceptible curves, so the broad concrete dual-lanes run between leafy walls of deep green, quite high and even. The median is intensely green. Palmetto and Spanish moss, invariably dramatic, feature the walls. This place is irrepressibly bursting with chlorophyll generators, green machines everywhere. Herbs and beans grow with little more than a nudge. Some say homegrown Florida tomatoes aren't as good as, perhaps, Vermont beefsteak reds, because they grow too fast, too easily. This would be bad country for winemaking: the lesson of Napa is that heat and lack of water "stress" the vines to produce a keener, smaller, sweeter and more complex grape. Grapes here would be fat and lazy, unstressed, flabby despite their best intentions.

Will I grow flabby here? I doubt it. My alarm clock is a pair of devilish boys who leap on me. They also bring my first Diet Pepsi of the day and demand stories. They'll return to the house from nursery and pre-school around 3:00 and I'll have dinner in the oven for an early meal. We have plenty of stories to make up, plenty of projects (they're helping me on "our" Dovekie), and a clutch of Arxea 703 secrets. Like our Crow-Planes – technologically advanced ornithopters, silent and disguised as mere crows patrolling the skies. Crow-Plane Alpha is piloted by Max, Crow-Plane Bravo by Luc. The black craft wait in a hangar under the lawn for immediate take-off and carry truly disgusting bad eggs from hens that occasionally lay under the house. These missiles of smelly disrespect are dropped on improper, stuffy, or overdressed people. The egg-bombed victims look up to find the source of their misfortune and notice only a pair of crows (heh heh heh) who couldn't possibly deliver such a blow to their composure. No, flab is not in the cards, mental or physical.

Even though I've arrived in G'ville, the Journey continues.

Braxinoso Speaks

The reception we received was unexpectedly enthusiastic, merry, relieved, welcoming in every way. We arrived as partners come to make life easier, not as visitors come to take our ease and advantage. They boys will be a handful of squirm and chaos. Like all the best cow-ponies, rally cars, sailboats and children, they are not "easy." They have personality and will. They won't be governed submissively. Pushing limits is their job description. Himself will get scraped and pounded but what joy to help raise them! Both of us feel younger.