I Will Absolutely NEVER— Live in Florida

It started with our honeymoon in Miami Beach in 1965.  Remember Hurricane Betsy?  She came roaring at us from the Caribbean, hung around off shore long enough to churn up the surf, and made a sharp right turn.  Close call - but wait.  Around Jacksonville, she changed her mind, made a U-turn, and came back.  Another right turn and she barreled across Florida, built up steam in the Gulf, and killed seventy-six people in Louisiana. 

A few years later, we were visiting my wife's parents in Boca.  The multitude of octogenarian northern transplants was the same annoying people they'd been back home, only older and crankier.  They all drove cars as big as ocean liners in the left lane, which caused the local rednecks to try to run them off the road.  And then there were the early-bird specials. 

The frogs that serenaded us each evening turned out to be alligators in the lake behind my in-laws' house, and one morning, I found a coral snake curled up on their front walk.  In summer, the weather was unbearable and the medical care was so horrendous we had to fly them up to Johns Hopkins whenever something went wrong.

My brother moved to Disneyworld to escape northern winters, went through two horrible marriages, and died there last year.  Attending his funeral, we met Hurricane Sandy who did her best to blow the funeral tent down.  We had to fly through her to get home, but she wasn't done with us, aiming right for our area on her way north to wreck the Jersey shore.

Did I need more reasons to hate Florida?  How about the gun culture?  The reactionary, intolerant politics?  And now, the Burmese pythons that have virtually destroyed the fauna of the Everglades and turned their ravenous eyes northward?  I was justifiably righteous when I smugly swore I would never be a Florida Snowbird much less live there.  Damn right, I was.

Then, last summer, my son and daughter-in-law decided to move to Orlando instead of San Diego.  We were especially horrified because they took seven-month-old Nate, our only grandchild, and Tessie, our favorite dog with them.  In September, we bit the bullet and flew down to visit them - missing them convinced me that adaptability was a more attractive quality than stubbornness. 

While we were there, my son suggested a trip to the beach.  With unpleasant memories of South Florida Atlantic beaches, I wasn't excited, but he assured us this place would be different.  He introduced us to New Smyrna Beach, a lovely, artistic town that lies between Daytona and the Canaveral seashore.  My wife had announced that she was retiring at the end of the year, and we both knew an idle winter in Maryland was not a good way to transition into the next phase of life.

Three hours after arriving in New Smyrna, I found myself signing a contract to rent a beachfront condo for January.  So here I am, writing this as I look out at the ocean.  I'm inside because it's too cold out on the deck. Nineteen days here and there have already been four hard freezes in central Florida.  But I'm not complaining.  Up north they're talking about this new thing called a Polar Vortex.  I think they're up to Polar Vortex 3, now.

We have to leave early because my mother is in hospice in New York.  There's almost a foot of snow at home today and there will be a negative ten degree wind chill when we exit the Auto Train in northern Virginia two days from now. 

Considering everything, three weeks here with Nate and Tessie never more than forty miles away have trumped five decades of certainty.  We've engaged a realtor to find us a place to buy in New Smyrna.  Like I said, never say NEVER.

Alan Zendell spent more than thirty years as a scientist, aerospace engineer, software consultant, database developer, and government analyst, writing really boring stuff like proposals, technical papers, reports, business letters, and policy memoranda.  But trapped inside him all that time were stories that needed telling and ideas that needed expression, so with encouragement and cajoling from a loving baby sister he plunged into fiction.  Since then, he has written mostly science and extrapolative fiction with three-dimensional characters.  It’s the things they believe in and how much they’re willing to invest to preserve them that make a story worth telling.  It’s convincing interactions and well-researched credible plots that make a story worth reading. And, of course, like any writer, Alan loves having an audience.  You may find Alan’s books here