There's no place like home

I’ve gotten to talk about Florida several times recently. The student pastor at our church is moving with his partner to Florida to serve as a chaplain at Eckerd College, a Presbyterian college right on Tampa Bay between Fort DeSoto (view of Tampa Bay from Fort DeSoto beach pictured above) and the Skyway Bridge. I talked with them about this Sunday and yesterday. Today at physical therapy I met a woman who lived in Naples for some ten years, where my friend Andrew lived for several years. We reminisced about Naples, Fort Myers, Sarasota, and Bradenton and about living through Hurricane Charley, which cut through Port Charlotte right between north Naples, where she and her family were, and Bradenton, where my family and I were (that weekend – I was visiting from Illinois). She talked about loving the environment, but having mixed feelings about the poor schools, the ultra-rich lifestyle in Naples, and missing family up north. (They also made a killing selling their house at the height of the real estate bubble, then couldn't find any houses they could afford, and so returned. The buyer of their house is a speculator who leveled the house, built a new mansion on a modest-sized lot, but now can't sell it.) Talking with both of these people I trotted out my story about driving across the Skyway Bridge in a rental truck, as Stephanie and Vincent and I left Florida (for good?) and looking out over the sun and blue water of Tampa Bay (with Eckerd College to my left) and saying to Stephanie: “Why is it again that we’re moving away from here?” Although we miss family and friends and the beach, sinkholes, and river, we do think Louisville is beautiful (all the more so in the spring – despite bad allergies, for me) and Stephanie and I do enjoy driving along and across the Ohio River (Stephanie – every work day), and we like the “river city” atmosphere, as we drive and walk through historic neighborhoods with interesting 100-year-old plus buildings (like the one I lived in my first year in Louisville). And we like many things about our jobs, our schools, our church, and people we’ve met. But we miss people, especially in Ohio and Florida, and we do miss Florida, in general (all the more so during the elongated through March winter). (Besides my Mom, we’ve recently also communicated with Stephanie’s former colleague, Marilyn, who was in the news with her students [one pictured above] when they went to help clean up an old, partly abandoned, black cemetery in Bradenton and discovered a grenade, and Andrew, about the March Madness pool and the death of our friend David’s father [see “Condolences”]. Our cousin on Stephanie’s side of the family recently moved from Fort Myers Shores to the Land of the Lakes in Tennessee [see the “Murray State” blog entry].)