Wauchula, Florida

I couldn’t sleep. It was a hard night of tossing and turning on the bed which couldn’t have felt any different than a sheet of bedrock. Images and conversations from the past quickly began to come into mi...nd as I stared into the darkness of my room. There’s no need to mention I’m perpetually homesick. I found myself gazing through old photos from an old acquaintance who no longer lives in Florida but could recount the era in which these photos seem to signify………. It was a beautiful summer’s day with nearly a stark sky without a trace of summer or autumn. Hank Williams Sr. blared over the airwaves and he spoke at unsafe speeds about how interested and fascinated Europe seemed. We were en route to Wauchula meaning you drive the lost highway clear and far out from all of modern day suburban America which seems to nearly swallow the landscape of Tampa. It’s a queer thing when comparing this to Belgium as you cannot drive a meager ten miles and feel you’re all alone at the end of the earth, in Belgium this is nearly impossible. Rolling on the highway passing swamp, flat lush green farms, abandoned roadside complexes, orange groves and road kill an impending economic crisis was about to befall on these states and have a rippling effect across the world. It seems rather inconceivable now when pondering back then (now six years). We rode into Wauchula and something similar like what I had experienced in Poland hit me. Character. There’s something about these timeless “historical” towns that bigger cities seem not to obtain. This was a place where I could see our grandparents walking around smoking cigars, drinking coffee, everything being swell, a divine time in America in which I wish I could’ve witnessed or known second hand from my grandpa who never exposed these secrets or from infamous Uncle Harper who I never got to meet, I imagined scenes from Charlie Chaplin’s The Immigrant of our forefathers who had left these odd places of the east in search for something beyond what they knew, I saw the childhood of my Mee Maw in which seemed golden, I saw the newspaper being delivered, men in slicked back hair, the milk man carrying his daily crates door to door, Buddy Holly playing on the juke box, I saw a fragment of our past in which I can only see now in history books and photos. Forward to 2012. I rode out alone on The Magna one random day had familiar effects from then and was reminded of friendly faces from the past. A fellow who I once encountered prior to flying to San Antonio, TX, happily enlightened me on the joys of hunting in his vast wilderness around this region; I was reminded of all the pleasant conversations that took place with this lunatic from Circleville, Ohio. When staring into these photos so many conversations and warm dialects come to mind. It would be a dream to go around and lurk some of these timeless little towns like Wauchula, Fort Meade and Mulberry. Florida is a place where the pace of life is tranquil; where the alligators float lazily down the river and where the crickets sound their sonnet every evening.