old Florida

We had just three nights and four days in the Castaway Cottages, not near enough time in paradise if you consider the six-hundred-mile round trip to Panama City from northeast Alabama, getting lost twice in Montgomery, and the motoring power of a six-cylinder ’62 Chevrolet Biscayne. By the time we got there, we were just turning around.

My mother, aunt, two brothers, grandma, cousin, and a dog named Barnabas all squeezed into a two-bedroom apartment with a pool in the parking lot and a black-and-white TV with a slow horizontal roll, and it was still about the most fun we ever had. We tumbled down dunes and got sand in our ears, and caught a crab in a bucket, and saw a dolphin, honest to God. We played miniature golf in a garden of cement dinosaurs, and would have had a beer-smoked hot dog at a joint called Lum’s, but figured it was probably a sin.

But who would ever believe me up there in the red dirt where we started out, with just some cold fried chicken and tomato sandwiches and a frozen Clorox jug of drinking water? Who would believe these dunes and emerald