I was fourteen when my parents both got cancer. We were living in Florida, in a house on the Choctawhatchee Bay. At night little green tree frogs pressed their stomachs soft against my bedroom windows and Spanish moss filtered down, almost audibly, through the trees. We'd been there for five years, hiding out, after my father's company went under and we had to leave Atlanta. We had going away parties and sold the house for an exorbitant amount to some new developers but we may as well have left in the night, clutching our most precious to our chests.
The town of Destin, known to tourists as The World's Luckiest Fishing Village sits on an isthmus, a population of almost 12,000 residing on a shallow nugget of land sandwiched between the Choctawhatchee Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. Equidistant from Pensacola and Panama City, Destin's year-round residents are made up of a mixture of blue-collar fishermen, military families from the nearby Englin Air Force Base and a smattering of wealthy, new money inhabitants looking for a quiet place to settle. Originally occupied by several Native American tribes who were then conquered by the Spanish, the land making up Okaloosa County is rich with interesting names. Words like Valparaiso, Ocala, Shalimar, Seminole and Villa Tasso, which had more vowels than I knew what to do with, bounced off my tongue as I called them out sing-song like from the backseat of the car.
We moved into a house on Indian Trail, a lonely street that stretched out long and flush against the bay. The only homes were all on the bayside, our only neighbors across the street the dense and scraggly forest, a winding twist of dried out trees and lichen, with lizards that snaked underfoot and opossum hanging hidden in the harsh noon sun. Being an only child I had long ago gotten used to spending my afternoons alone, riding up and down the quiet stretch of our street, wading through the bay, picking barnacles off the pilings under the dock and kicking over dead horseshoe crabs to peer at their prehistoric underbellies.
Softkey Left softkey Right