home again

 

We left 7H yesterday morning and drove over here to Apalachicola in the rain. Traffic was light and so was the rain at Times, though someTimes rain was quite heavy. We loved living here, and we love coming back and being here, and if it weren't for St Andrews and 7H, this is the place of my heart and home is where the heart is, eh? Apalachicola changes, but everything is always just right about it. It's been the unique place in my life since I first started coming here with my father in his seafood business in the middle 1940s.

Smitten is the word, Love! Moved away soon 27 years ago, we know hardly anyone here any more, but still love Apalachicola, its character. It could be a movie set.

When we moved here in 1984 there was no stop light in town, only a flashing light by The Grill on US98 at Avenue E and Market Street. Now there's a stop light in town: One.

A person who is attached to places, I don't understand how anyone who was born and grew up here could ever bear to move away.

This Time we are here for a funeral Friday afternoon, at Trinity Church. Born in 1999 a few months after we moved home to Panama City, the young man was the son of a dear parishioner. We came back soon after his birth to baptize him. He died last week of the flu. 

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Travel, even driving the short 65 miles or so from Panama City to Apalachicola, is exhausting for us at this age, which is why we came over Thursday and plan to return home to St Andrews on Saturday. But also because we're in Apalachicola. We don't come very often any more, and we make the most of it while we're here! I eat oysters. Linda shops at the River Lily. The oysters no longer are Apalachicola Bay oysters, those I had for noontime meal yesterday were from Alligator Point: tasty, salty and ice cold; right down Water Street at Up The Creek Raw Bar. We'd plans to go to restaurants in Eastpoint and on St George Island, but the weather was rainy and miserable so we stayed here in town. We may try again today, though it's cold and windy, feels like 48°F and wind NE 12 mph with gusts to 23 mph.

Thinking of a line: happy is the bride whom the sun shines on; blessed are the dead whom the rain falls on.

For this place RSF&PTL

T89&c