It’s morning in Alabama. I’m driving. There is green everywhere. Live oaks that are old enough to predate the Stone Age. Tin sheds. Peanut fields with perfect rows that run for miles in straight lines.
American flags are hanging from most mailboxes, horse trailers, workshops, treehouses, and semi-truck garages.
There are plenty of curves ahead, winding through the viridian landscape. They will take you past Faith Chapel Church, Providence Primitive Baptist Church, New Chapel Baptist, First Assembly of God, United Methodist Church. And a heap of other three-room meeting houses with well-kept cemeteries.
There’s the Perry Antique Store—which used to be a gas station one hundred years ago. It sits on approximately thirteen million acres of flat earth. Old men sit on its porch, chewing the fat. Watching traffic.
There are ancient mobile homes with brand new Fords parked out front. There are brand new mobile homes with ancient Fords. I pass red-dirt-road offshoots that lead to God-Knows-Where. Horses in front yards. Cattle in backyards.
Weathered brick chimneys, standing in empty fields.
Telephone poles with fading signs
that read: “I buy junk cars.”
I pass small towns, small communities. Brantley. Pine Level. Elba. Kinston is about as big as a minute, but they have a nice baseball field. Baseball is serious business in Kinston.
“Now entering Geneva County.”
I pass bumpy creek bridges—I have to slow down to drive across. There’s a crumbling red house—probably older than the late great Kathryn Tucker Windham.
Bass boats sit by the highway with for-sale signs. Farm-implement graveyards stretch clear to China.I am getting close to home. The county in Northwest Florida that sits sandwiched between the Alabama line and the Choctawhatchee Bay.
There is a man, burning trash in his front lawn. There are man made bass and bream ponds. Dead corn fields. Overgrown yards with rusty swing sets and children’s playhouses, with wood rot.
Rusty mailboxes with flags up. Pilgrim Rest Baptist…