Why Venice

Why do people end up where they do?  I left Florida in 1970 to move to New England because my husband at the time had gone AWOL in New Haven and wanted to return.  Armed with our college degrees, we had no jobs, no money and no contacts.  But, when we arrived in Northampton, Massachusetts and noticed longhairs smoking weed on the street, we rented a room in a dilapidated boarding house.  Crazy, huh?  Yep.  Certifiable.

This was the middle of summer.  There is no more beautiful place than New England in summer.  We were enchanted.  Until I discovered I was pregnant and the first snowstorm hit us on October 13th.  We didn’t see the ground until after I came home from delivering my first child in early April.  We had also moved three times.

My husband loved, loved, loved the winter!  Of course, he had grown up in Why Not Minot, North Dakota while I was a native Floridian.  Not the best match, but while I was hallucinating that the sound of snowmobiles were ski boats on the lake I grew up on In Orlando, I was determined to last three years and then return to warmer weather.  I lasted 13 years.  He’s still in Northampton.

I was talking to a couple of old friends who also grew up in Florida. They ended up in New Hampshire and have been there 35 years.  Like me, they couldn’t wait to leave Florida.  Why?Because, we grew up without seasons.  No chance of a white Christmas.  No trek into the forest to chop down a Douglas fir and haul it home on a sleigh.  No sled under the tree waiting to be ridden down a nearby hill.

Of course, back then we didn’t know a New England summer was about 10 minutes long and most of your life was spend hunkered down for a long winter.  I discovered my ‘best self’ is in absentia in winter.  And after I moved from the arctic to Maryland, I was so relieved that the winters were so much milder.

And, then, they weren’t.  The older I got, the worse the winter blues got.  I had these fantasies about living in Florida.  Always near a beach.  Never back to Orlando.  I love my family but that Disney traffic and completely unregulated development ruined it for me.  I wanted the ocean.  A smallish town on the Atlantic.  Maybe Melbourne Beach.

And then along came Buff Honey, who shared my Florida fantasy.  His parents had retired to Ormond Beach on the east coast many years ago and he annually drove his brood to visit.  He was a native Georgian, raised in Maryland but Florida became part of his blood also.

BH is a Baltimore Orioles fan.  Not just any fan.  For many years, the O’s were terrible, losing way more games than they won.  But, BH faithfully drove to Florida to watch them play during spring training in March.  What he learned was that there were a few other baseball fans out there and even though the O’s played in Sarasota, he couldn’t book a room because they were all sold out.  He stayed in Venice, about 20 miles south of Sarasota.

He loved Venice….the quaint downtown built in the 1920’s.  Beautifully preserved on the Gulf Coast.  A little paradise.  My closest college buddies were from Venice and when I visited Venice in 1970, the population was 6500.  Now, it’s pushing 22,000 and thanks to those baby boomer snowbirds, it’ll mushroom in the next few years.

Now, it’s listed among the top 10 retirement places and the top 10 Florida towns.  If I could close the gates…..not going to happen.  

I admit I was not the avid baseball fan BH is but that has changed.  Unfortunately, now that the O’s have completely turned their team around and are competing well into the post season, tickets for spring training games are few and far between in Sarasota.  But, we did manage to venture 30 minutes south to Port Charlotte to see the O’s play Tampa Bay on their opening day.

Got seats on the third base side, under the awning, a great view of the ball field.  A perfect Florida spring day….low 80s, an easy breeze cooling things off.  I closed my eyes to take it all in, tears of gratitude welling up.

Ahhh….so that’s why we’re in Venice.