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Cannot visualize or imagine anything nicer than this moment. Sitting outside on my upstairs front porch looking out across a flat St. Andrews Bay bluer than the sky. 76 F up here right now, although the second story roof keeps the upstairs porch warmer. Which is nice this time of year.

Walk down to the Bay and My Laughing Place under the scrufty cedar tree, and back. The acacia is yellow but tonight’s predicted chill may get it, and the grapefruit are yellowing on two of the trees, the third tree seems to be nonbearing. Pink grapefruit on the lower tree, ruby red on the tree beside the downstairs porch, where I am now. Eleven degrees cooler down here.

It’s still Alfred’s house to me, though the front porches weren’t screened when he lived here going on a hundred years ago.

Half that time, fifty years ago, November 1962 would put me on campus at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor where we already had our first snowfall three weeks ago, grey sky, black trees, white ground from mid-October to mid-May when that year we had our last snow. No place for a Panama City native. We had our train tickets by then, leaving Ann Arbor the moment school was out for Christmas Vacation, change trains in Cincinnati, me, Linda, Malinda and Jody in a luxurious Pullman sleeping car bedroom for the night, woke up next morning at the L&N station in Pensacola, where my parents met us and took us to my grandparents house. Lunch and visit with Mamoo and Daddy Walt, then home to PC. 

The surprise in PC was that my parents had just acquired this house, “the Old Weller Homestead,” bringing it back into the family after long years. Mom and Pop, Evalyn, Ruth, my father, and Marguerite had moved out in, as I recall, 1920, a couple years after Alfred’s death at 18, their grief still too raw to bear, and moved to Ocilla, Georgia where Pop owned the Ford agency for a few years, a story to be told yet one more time again another day. For now it’s all about Alfred’s house that is so dear to me. 

Every day of that two or three week winter vacation fifty years ago, 1962, my father and I worked in this house. It was fifty years old then, had gone to seed and we started reclaiming. Take down walls, partitions that had been built by the WWII owners making it into four apartments. There was a wall in the dining room blocking off the stairs, and I remember the look on my father’s face as we let down that wall, revealing stairs with bannister that had characterized a warm and loving home where he had been a boy.

Mom, my grandmother, had been dead fifteen years by then, but Pop lived until 1964; yet he declined invitations, refused ever again to come back into this house he had built for Alfred.

Thursday evening, November 8, 2012

Tom in +Time