Florida
It’s rare that I ever admit it but I do miss Florida at times. The North is never more
dead that it is now in its inchoate spring; even the brutish winter has a sort of life to
it, a vitality sprung from necessity. But now it is late April and we are all just fucking
tired, and the cold seems endless in a way that it never seemed in January; we
celebrate the thermometer creeping above freezing with a joylessness I never feel
in the true ugly winter. I love the North and the cold and its bitter weird seasons, but
just for a little while here in the bleak reluctant spring I miss the pure lushness of Florida,
the blatant, almost obscene sensuality of the subtropical heat. It’s overwhelming sometimes
to go back there, especially in midwinter, when the city here is cloaked in the silent grey I love
so deeply, and my parents’ home is crawling with the ebullient green of ivy and elephant ears,
and the smell of the Atlantic insinuates itself into the air, twined with the scent of flowers; the
sounds of life are everywhere, and skin is perpetually beaded with sweat. Maybe it’s just the
juxtapositions we know I love so much; maybe I’m just weird.