I Remember when Seminole was Orange Groves
- Posted on February 16, 2017
- in Uncategorized
- by caseyshuniak@gmail.com
When I was a child, Walsingham was just a two lane road, lined with orange groves on one side and tall grass on the other, and each morning we’d drive what was damn near the length of it when my mother dropped me off at this small church that doubled as a school. That church burned down years ago, and they sold the land to… I’m not too sure… but now there’s a college campus where it’d remained, charred and quarantined with a chainlink fence, for years.
Actually, that can’t be right. They sold the land, all of it, the church and the orange groves and the tall grass, before the fire. They must have, because I remember a large sign in front of the orange trees at the corner of Walsingham Road and Seminole Boulevard that read “Coming Soon: St. Petersburg Community College, Seminole Campus,” and my mother saying, “See that, Casey? You’ll go to college here one day.”
She was right. Twenty years later and that’s where I was, in a big glass building where the air conditioning was always too low and I was always freezing and failing calculus and hating every minute of it. I don’t think I liked going to school in the church, either, twenty years prior, but I remember being so much happier then. Maybe it was only twelve years, or eleven. That’s probably more right.
Where I come from, it doesn’t really matter to anyone if it was twenty years or only eleven, or what had been there before, or why it wasn’t there anymore. We have no memory for those things, for history, so when I’d say things like, “My mother used to slow down on Walsingham so I could smell the orange blossoms and count rabbits before they shot off like little firecrackers,” it just made things awkward for everyone.
It was years after that when I met my wife, who’d grown up here too and used to drive passed orange trees of her own. She remembers when Willowdale wrapped around row after row after row of groves, until they paved a new road right through the heart of the them, and eventually built row after row of houses they named the Orange Groves.
I have no idea what was here before the orange groves. At some time, before Seminole Boulevard and Seminole Campus and Seminole the city, this all belonged to the Seminole Indians, until Cabeza de Vaca and a thousand conquistadors landed somewhere nearby, we don’t know where exactly. Maybe there were only five hundred conquistadors, or two hundred, but I remember hearing the way Alvar Nunez described the lightning and it was beautiful. For a split second, not even, just a flash, he’d said the entire sky lighted up like the sun and then a deafening crack tore through the air, and only then did Nunez notice the black skeletons of trees that had remained standing for five hundred years or more, suddenly charred black but still standing, like steeples toward the heavens.
Imagine what that must have been like, if you’d never been in a thunderstorm before, and to suddenly realize what kind of natural order could spread ominous, black bones all over the landscape. Maybe that was why they needed so badly to build churches in the first place.
I remember learning about climate change, sometime when I was little, and learning it all wrong. For some reason, we thought the only way to do flood control was to fix the natural order, drain the swamps and the marshes and plug up the aquifer with dirt that we could doctor for orange trees and the like.
Now we can’t understand why there are so many sinkholes swallowing our houses, and why the roads on Miami Beach are under high tides, and how Mosaic’s lakes could possibly poison the waters that neighbor them.