Just when we think every square acre of Florida has been developed into an active community for people 55 years of age or older -- which includes myself -- I spot a sign for the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Heritage Park and make a dangerous U-Turn in front of a semi so we can visit.
Do you remember the book-worse-than-Bambi, The Yearling? I do, vividly.
The Yearling, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' best seller, was published in 1938 and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1939. My mother Mae was 15. My birth mother, Jeanine, would not be born for another three years.
Rawlings lived in and wrote about Florida's "Big Scrub" -- now the Ocala National Forest, which is filled with longleaf pine sandhills, hammocks of evergreen oaks, and all manner of critters that creep, crawl, and roam through four wilderness areas. Outside of these wilderness areas, the forest has been logged but remains "one of North Florida's last-remaining traces of forested land."
Rawlings wrote, "There is no human habitation—there never has been and probably never will be—in the scrub itself...a vast wall, keeping out the timid and the alien."
Although born in Washington, D.C., the college educated journalist Rawlings fell in love with the Big Scrub, purchased 70 acres of land and a modest house, and moved when she was 32, living there full time for 13 years. She died of a cerebral hemorrhage in St. Augustine, Florida, her home with her second husband, when she was only 57. She was by all accounts a tough, strong willed old broad who kept dogs and gamecocks, went hunting and fishing, and, like all writers, preferred long periods of solitude.
Her writing, much like that of downeast Maine's Ruth Moore, has been castigated (mostly by white men a.k.a. "the dominant culture") as "regional," to which Rawlings retorted that people's lives everywhere and of all kinds have larger meanings than "quaintness."
Here's to rural living, rural writing, women writing, and the preservation of the wild places on our planet.
#bigscrub
#ruralflorida
#mywritinglife
