My Youth Sticks With Me
I’m writing this on a cold day in Omaha. It’s currently 34ºF (1ºC) with a windchill of 20ºF. It’s supposed to get colder as the day goes on. It’s times like this where I wonder why I live here and start longing for warmer weather.
I got a little laugh yesterday when I checked in on my hometown in Florida and saw they had a “cold weather advisory”. Wind chills were about the same as they are here this morning. What’s normal here during the winter is somewhat abnormal there, as it can get cool in Pensacola, but not often does it feel like it’s below freezing. The high yesterday was to be around 60ºF. I would take that in a heartbeat.
This time of year, it’s not uncommon to see me replicating things from my youth, when I lived somewhere warmer. I’ll start eating food that reminds me of growing up on the Gulf Coast, whether that be traditional Southern food, seafood, or Cajun and Creole food (Pensacola is NOLA adjacent). I dive into the teams I rooted for while I was down there, like the Orlando Magic (NBA) and Tampa Bay Lightning (NHL), as sports connect me to a larger community, if even for a couple of hours. My music tastes can even switch up to listening to more soul and blues, and occasionally certain country (I’m not into the mainstream stuff).
What I try to do is bring the Gulf Coast home with me. If I can think warm, maybe I can be warm. It’s a weird duality I have going, as I also realize I have to embrace the cold outside to be able to deal with it, so I’ll take those sub-freezing walks all while anticipating Spring Training baseball just to get a glimpse of Florida.
I sometimes wonder if I could live down South again. One thing I realized when I was down there taking care of some things after my father passed away in 2017 was that I knew my way around Pensacola, in which I could navigate my way around the city without much use of GPS, all despite having never driven the city before since I wasn’t driving age yet when we moved north. It made the city feel very comfortable to me after all those years.
Where I struggle with the idea is politically, as northwest Florida is largely conservative and Florida as a whole has pushed for a lot of things I don’t agree with, such as anti-LGBTQ legislation and the whitewashing of American history (more so than we’ve done at a national scale), all in the name of making white conservatives comfortable. But, I also recognize two things: not everyone believes everything that’s being pushed there and it’s not too much different up here in the Nebraska-Iowa area either. Much of this push is nationwide, especially in more rural areas, but Florida is just slightly ahead of most of the country.
To me, Confederate flags and doing dumb redneck shit isn’t what makes you Southern. It’s more about how you carry yourself, treating your neighbors with kindness, and what you put on your dinner table. Peel back the ugliness you see in the news and there’s actually a lot of beauty. Maybe I can see this because I was raised differently. My mom was in a fairly mixed environment at the hospital she worked at, and she would have house parties with those coworkers from time to time. I hung out with some of her coworkers’ kids. A couple of them even became friends with my neighborhood friends, which was also fairly mixed, with whites, Blacks, Hispanics, and Pacific Islanders. Looking back, I realized how blessed I was to have this growing up. This is probably why I believe I feel like I’d be just fine if I ever moved back.
For now, I’ll just continue replicating what I can. My time in Florida was during my most influential years growing up. Pensacola will always be a part of me. I like myself more when I’m in my “Florida mood”. I feel more mellow when I’m like this, as I’m reminding myself of a mostly happy time. Just know when I’m like this, I could also probably use a beach and an open-air bar.
