"Well, I mean, Florida isn't really in The South..." If I had a dollar for every time I've heard this, I'd be financially stable enough to retire at twenty. I understand the concern, I really do, even a place as backwards as the South doesn't want to claim the state that is home of the infamous "Florida man" and invasive pythons. Whether we get to be a part of your exclusive regional club or not, I have to defend the state I've spent more than half of my life in. My Florida is not the g-strings and clubs of South Beach. It is not the mimosas and Lilly Pulitzer clad retirees of Palm Beach. It is not the street dwellers and cat trainers of Key West. It is not the college bars and campuses of Gainesville or Jacksonville.
My Florida is unapologetically and unromantically sitting in traffic for twenty minutes, sweating through my clothes in an a 90s BMW with no air conditioning. It is a mix of urban sprawl and mid-century suburban communities that grew out of demolished orange groves. It's multi-million dollar McMansions on the coast and migrant communities thirty minutes inland.
Again, I really do understand why you want to pretend we aren't here. We're the drunk uncle at Christmas dinner. We've also done a lot off good for you though. You know that Lilly Pulitzer you love so much? Yeah, you have us to thank for that. Your love of leisure activities is pretty alive here as well. I mean, half our state is (probably) over the age of fifty.
I'm the anomaly in Florida — the middle class. I grew up in a ranch style house with jalousie windows and terrazzo floors in a neighborhood where I was one of the only kids on the block. I bounced from public school to private school. The private high school I went to for two years was attended by girls with personal trainers and boys who got spray tans for prom. Once the principal asked over the PA system for someone to move their Porsche from the sophomore parking lot. The public high school I attended was the polar opposite, and has an increasingly alarming low literacy rate and boasts that its students dual enroll in community college courses. Sometimes our schools go on lock down because of a stray alligator roaming around campus.
The air is so thick that when you walk out of an air conditioned building your glasses fog up. You never know if the moisture on your skin and clothes is from the water in the air or the perspiration seeping out of your pores. I grew up tan, freckled, and mosquito bitten. My feet were hard from the hours spent barefoot on the pavement and the rough, weedy grass.
mSo yeah, we're far from perfect in a lot of ways. I won't deny that sometimes I wish I would get a Southern membership card for all the long summers and swamps I've endured. I've come to appreciate all the quirks of my state though, and we don't need to be a part of your sweet tea sipping, drawling club... we're doing just fine on our own.
