Anonymous Poster
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My neighbor showed up on the front porch Sunday evening. It was raining buckets when he got here. I saw him pull up in the yard in his beat up old Chevy pickup, and Fred and I went out to meet him.
I'm not going to say this man's last name, he has more relatives than Carter has liver pills. He's eighty if he's a day and he still manages his own grove and runs a couple hundred head of cattle.
I've seen this man up close maybe six times and not one of those times did he have any shoes on. His feet look like bricks of bread dough that have been dropped in the dirt two or three times for good measure and his toenails are all black. From cuticle to tip. Not dirty. Black....unhealthy. Like he smashed every one of them at some point and they are just waiting for a likely moment to fall off.
No teeth, if he has any, he has never worn them to my knowledge, and his earlobes hang down to his shoulders on both sides. When he grins, which is often enough, his face looks like an apple that might have been good to eat last year.
He is an old Florida cracker, owns most of the land around here, used to own ours until he gave it to his grandson who proceeded to sell it.
"Kids got no sense anymore," says the old man "land's the only thing worth having."
Anyhow he came to tell us that half his cattle seemed to have gotten loose and he wanted to know if we had seen any of them, as they have on occasion been found on our property. We told them that we hadn't, but that we would keep a look out.
He went as quickly and unexpectedly as he came, walking through the pouring rain like it wasn't even there and I was sad. I would have loved to wile away the afternoon listening to him talk about old Florida, and how they did things in the good old days. I've had the pleasure of hearing a few of his stories, but only enough to whet my apetite for the history of this place.
He told us once of swarms of mosquitos that blacked out the sun after a hard rain, how he huddled under an old wet blanket on his back pasture to escape a sudden brush fire. He told us of planting the trees that now comprise our grove, tucking them into the soil when they were six inches tall, tress that are now fourteen to fifteen feet high.
The year of the locusts, the many years of droughts, the year of the citrus canker, the year of the hard freeze. Just little tidbits, here and there, tossed out like the occasional bone to the hungry dog.
I watched him inch his truck out of the driveway. He's not the kind of guy you can 'invite over' for supper. He's the type who comes to pay his respects when a family member dies, leaving after only a few moments, not wanting to overstay his welcome.
He comes and goes with no warning, appearing like a gift, and never stays long enough to satisfy me. There is nothing I'd like to do better than write a book on the local history of this area, and he would be a fine one to fill it. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I had nothing to lose by asking.
This morning I made up my mind and I went to see old Jesse and I asked him if he would consider being the subject for a book about the local history of our area and he said he didn't mind if he did. So now I have a new project. We set the interview times for evenings around seven, which also gives me an opportunity to bring him a few dinner meals as I don't think he eats well. I cannot wait to get started! /forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif
I'm not going to say this man's last name, he has more relatives than Carter has liver pills. He's eighty if he's a day and he still manages his own grove and runs a couple hundred head of cattle.
I've seen this man up close maybe six times and not one of those times did he have any shoes on. His feet look like bricks of bread dough that have been dropped in the dirt two or three times for good measure and his toenails are all black. From cuticle to tip. Not dirty. Black....unhealthy. Like he smashed every one of them at some point and they are just waiting for a likely moment to fall off.
No teeth, if he has any, he has never worn them to my knowledge, and his earlobes hang down to his shoulders on both sides. When he grins, which is often enough, his face looks like an apple that might have been good to eat last year.
He is an old Florida cracker, owns most of the land around here, used to own ours until he gave it to his grandson who proceeded to sell it.
"Kids got no sense anymore," says the old man "land's the only thing worth having."
Anyhow he came to tell us that half his cattle seemed to have gotten loose and he wanted to know if we had seen any of them, as they have on occasion been found on our property. We told them that we hadn't, but that we would keep a look out.
He went as quickly and unexpectedly as he came, walking through the pouring rain like it wasn't even there and I was sad. I would have loved to wile away the afternoon listening to him talk about old Florida, and how they did things in the good old days. I've had the pleasure of hearing a few of his stories, but only enough to whet my apetite for the history of this place.
He told us once of swarms of mosquitos that blacked out the sun after a hard rain, how he huddled under an old wet blanket on his back pasture to escape a sudden brush fire. He told us of planting the trees that now comprise our grove, tucking them into the soil when they were six inches tall, tress that are now fourteen to fifteen feet high.
The year of the locusts, the many years of droughts, the year of the citrus canker, the year of the hard freeze. Just little tidbits, here and there, tossed out like the occasional bone to the hungry dog.
I watched him inch his truck out of the driveway. He's not the kind of guy you can 'invite over' for supper. He's the type who comes to pay his respects when a family member dies, leaving after only a few moments, not wanting to overstay his welcome.
He comes and goes with no warning, appearing like a gift, and never stays long enough to satisfy me. There is nothing I'd like to do better than write a book on the local history of this area, and he would be a fine one to fill it. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I had nothing to lose by asking.
This morning I made up my mind and I went to see old Jesse and I asked him if he would consider being the subject for a book about the local history of our area and he said he didn't mind if he did. So now I have a new project. We set the interview times for evenings around seven, which also gives me an opportunity to bring him a few dinner meals as I don't think he eats well. I cannot wait to get started! /forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif
