What's Different in South Florida

It's been a very quiet day in South Florida, and I paused to reflect on things that I have noticed that are different than Ellsworth or the Twin Cities. These are what I noticed first, I'm sure there will be more.
1.  It gets dark early.  Of course, it gets dark early up north also, but up there, when the weather is in the high seventies it is light later, because of course, it's July then. Here we have summer weather and winter hours of daylight.  And it feels very strange. 
2.  We have neighbors.  Everyone has neighbors, but in Ellsworth they are at least a tenth of a mile away, and here they are 20 feet away.  Very different.  Luckily, the houses are made of cement, so sound doesn't carry very well.  The neighbors next door have teenagers, so sometimes they have pool parties on weekends, which we can sometimes hear, but it is no big deal.
3.  Half the neighbors, and really, half the people down here, speak Spanish.  One neighbor, from Chicago, has lived here 22 years and still has a very Spanish accent.  There are a lot of Indian people here also.  Lots of diversity compared to Ellsworth or Wisconsin. 
4.  It is FLAT.  There are no storm sewers here.  There are, instead, drainage ditches that cut across all the neighborhoods.  So the roads are a kind of maze that goes around the various drainage areas.  Sometimes you'll be walking the dog and may be tempted to cut across a block only to find you can't because of the drainage.  (I've never tried this)

Some things are the same.  Home Depot is the same except that the plants are significantly different.
Target is pretty much exactly the same, and Target really feels like home. 

Feeling Like a Tourist

Today we were taking a motorcycle trip through the flat land of central Florida, and I realized that I really feel like a tourist here.  I thought, I will always feel like a tourist here.  Florida will never be home to me, as it is to so many Floridians down here, because I am just too old to ever become a "native", and also, I'm a very Midwestern person. 

I got to thinking about feeling like a tourist, and I realized that I have felt like a tourist in the places where I lived for so much of my life.  When I was twelve, we moved to Phillips, where there were two kinds of people, Phillips people, and 'tourists'.  The Phillips people I knew always thought I was a tourist.  They say your hometown, the place you are from, is the place that you graduate from High School.  Well, for me that was Phillips.  Yet, I never really felt like a native, even when I lived there. 

Between High School and my marriage, I moved 14 times.  That counts a lot of moving from apartment to apartment.   I did really feel at home in St. Paul.  I would have to say that was the one place I totally felt was home.  I more-or-less belonged.  I worked and lived in the same town, St. Paul, and I knew people there.

When we moved to Ellsworth, I felt again like a 'tourist'.  I carpooled with people who actually called Bob and I  "rich people from the CITY".  To our faces! I never lost the feeling of being a visitor.  After I'd had a child in St. Francis school for 12 consecutive years, the principal still got my name wrong.  And there was only at most 75 or 100 kids in the school at any one time.   You can't be a native in Ellsworth unless you had a great grandpa or grandpa, at least, that was born there.   When the kids were gone, I decided that I loved our farm, and it was home to me, in spite of the community.  I'd lived there longer than anywhere else.

Now I am a tourist again, for real.  That is just fine.  At this moment, I'm happy to think of my home as still in Ellsworth, and my final resting place, still in St. Paul where my girls are buried.  I'm good with that.  I embrace the tourist gig in South Florida for the time being.