| | Many years
to Sophia!
Esta es mi Florída
Yesterday, drove with the folks to Immokalee, an agricultural town west of Ft. Myers-- deep inside orange, tomato, sugarcane and cattle-ranch country. Agricultural town = Latin town, naturally: Immokalee is the home base for thousands of migrant farm laborers. It reminded me in many ways of old Lennox: the small, locally-owned panaderias, carnicerias, supermercados; streets trolled by tamale carts; but most of all the houses' bright, bright colors, and the vivid flowers of their gardens. Latin towns are at least three shades brighter than honky towns. Immokalee is more spacious and spread-out than Lennox. There is more space between the buildings, more trees and larger ones, but all the signage and speech is Spanish, and the streets boom with Mexican music.
We ate at a great little restaurant, the nicest in town, whose clientele sure-enough included Mexican cowboys with spurs on their boots. As we drove out, I looked at the trees and colors and thought, I wouldn't mind living in a place like this. The way out also took us past another, smaller part of town, the part that has honky things like Burger Kings and Baptist churches. I started noticing people along the streets who weren't Latin and immediately thought, well this is the white neighborhood.
Took a few minutes to register, all these people I was thinking of as white, were actually black. In a Latin town, to me apparently not-Hispanic = white.
On the road
This kid is now a full-time traveler. My summer job takes me to Port Charlotte three days a week, followed by one day in Tampa. The actual teaching is great, but the four-hour commute from Gainesville to Port Charlotte is draining (that's why I'm staying in Ft. Myers this weekend), and it gets tiring to constantly move in and out of hotel rooms. Plus, summer in South Florida is hot. At eight in the morning, I sweat rivers carting books & materials twenty yards from my car to the classroom.
It's love-bug season in Port Charlotte. The five-minute drive from the hotel to the classroom smears up my windshield something awful.
I'm not allowed to have favorites but third-graders are my favorites. They're old enough to be insightful, but young enough to be sweet. The first week, we read a book together about a sled dog in Alaska who takes medicine through blizzards to save sick children in Nome. I asked the kids what they know about blizzards, what they think it would be like to be in a blizzard, how they feel when they're in bad storms. This is the city that was flattened by Hurricane Charley two years ago, and my kids got really excited to tell me about their adventures during the storm. Holes knocked in walls, roofs torn off, how one girl's dad managed to repair a crumbling wall that, she assured me, if it had collapsed would have brought the house down killing her whole family. One boy and his folks went outside to survey the eerie calm as the hurricane's eye passed over.
I've never lived through a hurricane. I've always fled. These children are brave.
Gardening (update)
The evilest thing about being on the road is that I haven't seen my garden in a month. And Gainesville hasn't seen rain in a month. I'd just planted canteloupe, the carrots were getting large & succulent, and the squash & tomatoes were days from being ready. My former roommate had gone into gardening with me, but abandoned it when he got married, so there's nobody else in Gainesville to keep the poor plot alive.
This really, truly makes me sad. If I'd realized that this summer job would destroy good green life, I might not have taken it.
|
| | Posted 6/4/2006 12:56 PM - 2 views - 1 comments
- recommend
  - recs0
- give stars
- votes0
- share
- email
 - sent0
|
