A Pocket of Resistance Against the Tide of Change

by Lily Goodman

The ghosts of Florida reveal themselves in the autumn breeze. I felt it on my walk this fine morning, unusual coolness cutting through our famous subtropical heat. It’s as if Hurricane Milton came by and said, “Sorry for the mess I made; enjoy some nice weather!” Like so many storms before it, Milton had reshaped our landscape, another chapter in Florida’s cycle of destruction and renewal.

My mother is my connection to old Florida, and as she used drive me down the streets of our hometown, she’d point out all the changes. I’m sure a lot does change in fifty-five years. Sitting in the backseat of her minivan, watching trees whiz by through the window, she told me the legends of the Florida she knew, the real Florida.

How the highway didn’t always have so many lanes, and where there were million-dollar homes and strip malls, there used to be trees. I’d watch Florida’s wild heart being carved away as we passed a plot cleared of vegetation, seeing it rot in heaping brown hills. She muttered about out-of-state license plates and snowbirds and Yankees. I always found it a little funny, considering her husband, my father, was born and raised in New York. But I understood her pain – the Yankees were blocking our view of the river; the snowbirds were taking over my Florida.

Now I walk these streets as a Florida native daughter, where the sun beams down between the trees, and in the shade of damp leaves the air feels cool. I can smell the rich mud as I trample over fallen leaves and stomp on murky puddles. Memories collect here like dust – Sam with her pale skin and box-dye black hair, and Charlie in his tie beneath the mulberry tree. They’re part of this place now, just as much as the pine needles and palm fronds.

I walk through old Grandview Shores, where my mother and her mother would walk, where her and my aunts and uncles would play, where ordinary histories took place. This neighborhood is a living museum of old Florida – mid century-modern flat-roof houses like time machines. Lush, tropical plants beside dead ones. Colorful houses wearing streaks of dirt. Flaking paint on rotting wood. Each imperfection tells a story of survival against Florida’s relentless elements. If I close my eyes, I can picture my mother walking alongside me when she was a girl, and her mother before her. I imagine the countless mothers and daughters and sisters who made their home here – in humid, sticky Florida. In the place my mother calls, “the land that time forgot.”

The rhythm of Florida life plays on: Garbage cans rattling in the wind; rusty cars and fences fighting the dense air. Mango leaves strewn across the street, unripe fruits dropping with soft thuds. Barking dogs behind dilapidated fences. Anoles hopping from leaves to stones. The freight train and the Brightline shaking the ground like thunder. When that high speed train blazes past the exotic trees and the playground, rattling the antique plates and cast-iron, my whole house shakes. They scoff at this “progress,” this intrusion on paradise.

That’s my hood. That’s my Florida. And my yellow house, with the sun pounding on the front. This is home, with stray cats and old neighbors and families and raccoons and the smoky smells of cigarettes in the morning and fire in the evening. While the rest of Florida races toward some glossy future, Grandview Shores remains stubborn and true, a pocket of resistance against the tide of change. I’ve found my place in Florida’s story – not in its shining new developments or pristine beaches, but in its authentic heart, beating steady beneath the weathered surface of my home.