Sunday evening. Monday will come.

 

Apalachicola might be many things. It's another and different place for me now than it was earlier in my life. A seemingly forgotten fishing village with rundown fish houses hugging the river when I was a boy - - most or all of them still there but some abandoned and falling into the water when I returned to live here in my late forties. 

After years of big cities, this was my kind of relaxed community of mostly dirt roads and pickup trucks when we moved here from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania forty years ago this month, July 1984. Although during our years, Apalachicola started evolving into a shopping boutique. 

My life view of Apalachicola those years was mostly around Gorrie Square, where Trinity Episcopal Church is; my view out the rectory kitchen window looking over the fence and across the alley as I baked oysters on whole wheat bread in the toaster oven, was an old, vacant two-story garage shingled with leftover green asphalt roofing tiles, black tar paper covering the windows. The town was still flavored with last remnants of pioneer families, kind, gentle and generous folksy people who had been here for generations, and early memories. Neumann Marshall, whose black Chevy pickup truck would stop in the alley out back and he'd come to the kitchen door with a bag of fresh caught mullet dressed, split bone in, and ready for the frying pan.

We loved living here fourteen years and I thought we had grown to become townspeople, "locals," but I realized as we finished up and left the end of September 1998 that it would never be so for us. That seems all changed as new people have moved in and bought up the town, but in my perception in our Time here you had to have lived here enough generations for nobody to remember when your family came. Having lived here longer than anyplace ever except growing up in Panama City, only in our own minds were we ever regarded as "locals" and I didn't realize that until we were leaving to move home to Panama City! No matter,    

these days we return as occasional visitors. To me nowadays, Apalachicola is an anticipatory drive into town from the west, down Avenue E past familiar places, Penny's Worth, Piggly Wiggly, the old Chapman School building. There's a traffic light now that wasn't there, no traffic lights our years here, just a flashing red/yellow at Avenue E and Market Street where most traffic turns right at The Grill. Down to the river, right and round to the public restroom building first stop. Couple of shops Linda likes. Noon dinner, basically these days a restaurant we like, Half Shell Dockside just up Scipio Creek from our hotel. 

But if we're going out for an eating adventure, Blue Parrot on St George Island is our best in the area though a longer drive over and back than we are comfortable with at this age. Maybe a couple more Times or so!

That drive takes us across the "new" bridge where we had the ribbon cutting years ago by Mayor Jimmy Nichols, me standing beside him with a prayer and shaking holy water on the fresh concrete roadway. Which makes it my bridge.

There was a Time in the life of Trinity Church when the altar guild ladies took the Sunday altar flowers and tossed them over the bridge into the water after church, sort of a sacrificial offering of holy items. 

Nowadays to me, Apalachicola is a view looking east from the screen porch of my water front hotel room, loving the water traffic on Scipio Creek right beneath me and on Apalachicola River just the other side of the marsh grass. This spot is even more peaceful than 7H porch. I should have taken an opportunity some years ago to buy a place for halftime living shifting month to month or season to season back and forth between St Andrews and Apalachicola. No, it's better this way, drive over for the day or for a couple of overnights here on the creek.

In life there are Places of the Heart, and this is one of my two, the main one still and always being Panama City, St Andrews and 7H, where we're heading by midday Monday.

Our hotel room is on the top, third, floor, and this trip was only marred by the sign notifying folks that the elevator was Out Of Order, Our Apologies, and not to be back in service until sometime Monday when the regular repair technician can come over from Tallahassee. We managed, including by delaying our checkout from Sunday morning to Monday morning.  

For all that, I do not want to leave this Time. 

RSF&PTL

T88&c