11/10/2026
The Old Neighborhood
As I sit here at my desk, window open, listening to the crickets chirp after a late-afternoon downpour, dusk begins to settle over a lazy Sunday. In a moment, I hear the gravel of Cedar Street beneath my feet as I begin walking the old neighborhood again.
At the corner of Washington and Cedar, Grandma’s house sits underneath a grand old oak tree. Mounds of oak leaves dot the yard, just as they do every spring after the tree has shed itself bare. Grandma is wearing an old flowered sundress, work gloves, and a wide-brimmed straw hat. On her feet are her favorite blue velvet Hush Puppies, worn so often that her pinky toe has rubbed a hole through the side.
On the front corner of the house, tendrils from the red-and-white bleeding-heart vine have made their way up to the eaves. A fence post topped with a square of wood holds an old milk pail filled with Sprengeri fern.
“Can we burn the leaves today, Grandma?” I ask.
“Dennis, let me go call the fire department and see if they’ll give us permission.”
She leans the rake against the front doorframe and goes inside. A few minutes later, I hear her voice drift through the open window.
"This is Mary Murphy at 10708 Cedar Street. I want to see if I can get permission to burn some oak leaves. Yes, that's right. I'll be right here. No, there's no wind today. I'll do. Thanks a million.”
“The fireman says we can burn, but I want to finish raking first.” She grabs her rake and walks back to the side yard.
I make my way over to her car, a white 1967 Ford Fairlane sitting in the driveway, its deep-turquoise interior visible through the windows. Grandma says that she no longer trusts herself on the road after her cataract surgery.
“If I were to hurt someone, I couldn’t live with myself,” she says.
Still, I can sometimes talk her into driving around the block.
Inside, I go to my favorite room—her sleeping porch. Grandma sleeps here spring, summer, and fall. When the winter winds blow a little too cold, she draws the dark green canvas shades for protection and adds an electric blanket to the bed for warmth. I love to feel the cool satin ribbon along its edge.
I jump off the bed that's stacked two mattresses high. It's covered with an aqua-colored chenille bedspread with white and pink flowers. At its foot sits an old steamer trunk filled with her old high heels, clothing, and memorabilia. When I open its lid, a strong smell fills the room. Pew-yew—mothballs! I look over at the dresser, where a black-and-white photograph of Granddaddy Murphy looks back at me. He was a good-looking fella—a closed-lip smile on his face and thin-rimmed glasses. His hat is tilted slightly forward, as if to say, "Good afternoon, Dennis.”
On top of the dresser sits the powder music box that Granny won at the Florida State Fair and later gave to Grandma. I wind it up and hum along, knowing the melody without knowing the name of the song. I imagine the ballerina in the clock on the other corner of the dresser dancing along to the tune.
“You’re awful quiet in there. Are you plundering again?” Grandma shouts from the side yard.
Every once in a while, Mama and Granny go to Jai Alai, and I spend the night with Grandma. During springtime, the smell of night-blooming jasmine outside her sleeping porch is intoxicating, placing me under its spell as I drift off to sleep.
Out the back door I go, toward the old garage that had once been home to her cars. It now leans to one side, its wooden siding darkened by age and its corrugated tin roof gone rusty. The open door is like a black hole—a portal into another world. Light streams in through the gable vent at the other end of the building. Shafts of dusty light reveal memories hanging from every rafter. Spooky yet alluring—worth the risk, I say under my breath. My presence startles an old tomcat from behind a piece of plywood propped against the wall.
I run into the field, now slightly overgrown from the spring rains. Two old Airstream trailers sit there, bursting at the seams with treasures of their own. I don’t stop to plunder today; I’m making my way to the dock at the Pickard house. The house sits on the Alafia beneath huge oaks dripping with Spanish moss.
It is a house that has carried many names, depending on its inhabitants and which generation was telling the story. When Granny was a girl, it was the Otton home, where her school chum Blanche lived. For Mama and Uncle Glenn, it was the Pickard and Pitts place. But really, it was the old Murphy homestead, purchased sometime in the 1880s and sold in the 1930s after old man Murphy and Uncle Vince had died.
They say the old man, my great-great-grandpa, had mouth cancer and would wade out into the river screaming in pain, holding a raw steak against the open wound to ease his suffering.
The river house stands elegantly above the ground—high enough, I think, for a grown man to walk beneath it. I can. Large screened porches span the entire length of the front and back, giving the house a unique look.
For years, the place sat vacant. At night, beneath the old oak trees, shadows of Spanish moss danced across the white paint, giving it a ghostly appearance. When the wind blew, the porch swing would come to life and the screen door would open and close just enough to create an eerie creaking noise.
But none of that discourages me from stepping out onto the dock to watch the mullet jump and wave to a passing boat.
Standing on the dock, I turn and look back toward the house on the little hill that rises from the riverbank. A memory of Uncle Don comes to me.
“This bluff on the river was an old Indian settlement. I used to dig for arrowheads around the old house—accumulated a nice collection.”
I’d like to find one, I think.
I wander into the field next door at Mrs. Charlotte’s, a strip of land separating the Pickard place from hers. I pass Oliver’s little lean-to on my way down to the river’s edge.
A grand oak leans out over the water, its entire root system exposed where the tides have washed away the earth over the years. Fiddler crabs scurry into the darkness as I approach. Wooden slats nailed to the trunk form a ladder leading up to a frayed rope swing hanging from a long branch that juts out over the river. Years ago, a wild persimmon tree took root beside the oak and now clings to the bank of the river, its fruit still green and pale yellow. One bite of the unripe fruit is enough to make your mouth pucker for days—believe me, I know.
The back of the property facing the water is an overgrown jungle, with patches of banana trees lining a sandy path that leads down to the dock. As I make my way around to the front of the house, I wave to Polly and say, “Hey.” Polly is Mrs. Charlotte’s daughter and now lives in the old home place with her daughter Pat.
Polly and Granny have been friends for as long as I can remember, although Granny says that wasn’t always the case.
“Polly was a mean little sh*t—she’d pull my hair and bite me. I’d go home crying to Daddy until one day he told me, ‘If you don’t beat her a double s, the next time you come home crying, I’ll beat your a double s.’ Well, the next time she started on me, I wiped her ass. We were the best of friends from then on.”
Polly is sweeping the front porch, and for the first time, I notice that the house has a sleeping porch like Grandma Murphy’s. The sharp smell of mustard greens boiling and the sweetness of onions frying find me on the breeze. Out front, two giant oaks stand guard over the place, as they do at so many of the old homesteads.
I don’t remember Mrs. Charlotte; she died when I was young. Still, she belongs to my memory, even though she was never truly part of my life. Mama and Uncle Glenn put her there, painting her so vividly that I can see her beneath those oak trees, passing a wooden shuttle through her hands as the cast nets slowly take shape. I see Mama walking beside her to church on Sunday mornings and Mrs. Charlotte tapping her fingers against her Bible in that peculiar rolling motion.
Beyond those oaks, Magnolia Street separates her house from her brother Jack Sharp’s. It doesn’t look like a street at all. It was never paved when the other streets in the neighborhood were, so it looks more like a sand pit.
Jack lives on the old Sharp place, where he grew up and has spent his entire life. Until recently, his brother Jolly lived there with him. If I hurry, I can ask Jack for a piece of candy before his program starts.
As I approach the front porch, I hear a familiar voice coming through the screen door.
“Like sands through the hourglass, so are the Days of Our Lives.”
He and Grandma watch the same stories. I’ve missed my window, but I knock anyway and hear shuffling from the living room.
“Yes?” he calls.
“Jack, it’s Dennis. Do you have any Mary Janes?”
“Come on in. There’s a bowl on the dining room table. Grab you a few.”
I thank him as I leave and walk around back to the old building where his brother Jolly once lived.
Their sister, Mrs. Teresa Powell, once told me the story. Their parents had come from Ireland and first settled near the Florida–Georgia line. They lived aboard a houseboat that they operated as a ferry on the Jolly River. Jolly was born aboard that boat and named for the river.
“He was born on the river and lived his entire life on the water,” she said. “He and Jack fished from here all the way to Tampa Bay.”
An old wooden boat lies upside down outside the building. I push through the half-open door. Inside, a large scale hangs from the exposed rafters. Old fishing nets, floats, and boat oars fill the room, along with large spools of rope and twine. I reach for the knife lying on the workbench and begin cutting myself a length of rope when Mama’s voice comes to me.
“Tootie and I used to worry Jack and Jolly to death. We were always asking them for a piece of rope to use for a jump rope. We never knew what happened to the last piece they had given us.”
I retrace my steps toward Grandma's backyard. From there, a footpath leads past my swing set and a small citrus grove with raised worm beds that Granddaddy had started years ago. Mama and Uncle Glenn have a small plant nursery under the grapefruit trees. A big wooden sign at the corner of Palmetto Street and 301 announces "Hartley's Nursery," with an arrow pointing the way.
At the end of the path, just outside Granny's back porch, stand the remnants of the old WPA toilet, a palmetto rising from the middle and periwinkles spilling over the sides. I open the screen door and make my way into the house just as the 1960s-style Maytag washing machine begins its spin cycle. A lizard scurries across the porch screen. I try to catch it, but it's too fast for me.
Granny is on the phone with Gloria Farmer, her friend who lives in Orient Park. Even though Gloria isn’t there, I can smell her soft, powdery perfume.
Shalimar.
Precious, Granny’s Pekingese, is lying at her feet. Raising her head, she growls at me, then lowers it to lick her paws.
Every time I pass through the hallway leading to the bathroom and bedrooms, I can’t resist pulling open the built-in laundry hamper. It rolls smoothly with a slight squeak, thanks to Mama’s roller skates, which disappeared sometime in 1959. Granddaddy, being resourceful, had nailed them to the bottom of the hamper.
Worked like a charm.
Across the hall is the sewing room. On top of the dresser sits a framed portrait of Uncle Glenn as a baby. Beside it sits a baseball signed by an entire team and given to him while he was in the hospital as a little boy. I want to pick it up, but I know it’s off-limits.
I try to stay quiet so I don’t disturb Granny.
As I walk past her room, the pale lavender walls glow in the afternoon sunlight. A soft breeze ruffles the curtains and carries the familiar scent of Coty into the hallway.
But the back bedroom on the right is where I’m headed.
Uncle Don’s room.
Several posters are pinned to the walls, including one or two boxing posters. Uncle Don and Donny "Cowboy" Shiver had been best friends since first grade. Donny grew up to become a Tampa junior middleweight, winning twenty-two of his twenty-three professional fights. He was killed in a car accident at twenty-nine, less than a week after his final victory.
On the nightstand sits a round Prince Albert canister overflowing with change. As I lie on his bed, I take coins from the can one by one and slip them through a small crack in the wall. I listen as they hit the bottom, bouncing off the others that have accumulated between the studs. Then I begin singing my selection from the jukebox. When I forget the words, I start over—another coin, another song.
As I lie there singing away, I look above the bedroom door. A small cubbyhole is covered by a curtain. From behind it, the eye of a face stares back at me.
Startled, I jump off the bed and head for the living room.
Years later, I would figure out that the face belonged to one of Mama’s bride dolls. Even now, thinking about those damn dolls staring back at me gives me the heebie-jeebies.
No wonder I never liked spending the night with Granny.
She’s still on the phone, her conversation rather long-winded, so in my boredom, I part the lace curtains and peep through the living room windows. Next door, Mr. Allen is working on one of his cars—a Dodge Dart.
Not the one he drives every day, but the other one. I think it was his dad’s.
I walk over, poke my head beneath the hood, and ask, “What seems to be the problem, Mr. Allen?”
Smoke curls from the cigar resting on the fender well, almost overwhelming me.
“She’s got a little tick in the timing, Dennis. I’m trying to figure out why.”
Mr. Allen and I share the same birthday, so that somehow makes me feel close to him, even though he’s old.
A lawn mower motor sputters to life behind me. I turn and see Carl Quinn backing his mower out of the shed. He wears a perfectly pressed white shirt, khaki pants, and a baseball cap, both hands firmly gripping the bicycle-style handlebars of his red-and-white Toro as he begins making laps around the broad strip of land between his house and Mrs. Day’s.
“Good luck with your tick,” I say to Mr. Allen as I walk away.
As I pass Mr. Quinn, I wave. He lifts one hand from the handlebars and waves back. I glance toward his house and remember the cool things inside, everything in its place. Set into the living room floor is a star-shaped marquetry inlay he made with his own hands. A long wooden shelving unit holds Jerry’s collection of Sun Records, carefully arranged by artist.
Elvis takes center stage.
Mr. Quinn loved anything involving trains. When he went away for the weekend, it was usually train-related.
“Dennis, would you like to take an overnight train trip with me?” he once asked. “We’ll go from Tampa to Jacksonville on an old steam train.”
“A real steam train?” I asked.
“Yes, sir. A real steam train,” he said, smiling.
The steady hum of his Toro follows me as I continue down the street toward Mrs. Anna’s.
As I open the back gate—the one directly across from Grandma’s house—I hear her voice in my ear.
“I can’t believe Steve Janoski built that house there. When I moved here in ’23, that was nothing but swamp. A field of palmettos, standing in water.”
As I approach the house, I remember the pitcher pump beside the garage and make a beeline for it. I work the handle a few times.
Nothing.
Then I remember Uncle Glenn saying it had to be primed before it would give up any water, whatever that means.
I knock on the side door and see Mrs. Anna’s shadow through the frosted glass of the jalousie windows. She invites me in and asks if I’d like a cookie. Her cookie jar reminds me of Mrs. West’s, only it’s a different character. This one is Aunt Jemima. Mrs. West has Little Red Riding Hood.
Her kitchen window faces Grandma’s house, its ledge full of miniature ferns and violets growing in planters shaped like dolls. Cookie in hand, I walk over to her curio cabinet, where the large painted figurines catch my attention first.
“My Steve won them for me at the carnival,” she says.
After thanking her for the cookie a second time, I head back through the gate and turn left toward Anna Mae’s house. Along the way, I pass Aunt Thelma sitting on her side porch in a rocking chair. I wave and tell her I’ll come by later for a visit. She lifts her spit can, sends a stream of to***co juice into it, and says, “Okay, honey. I look forward to the company.”
As I round the corner, I see Anna Mae’s 1974 Pontiac Grand Prix in the driveway. Baby blue. I love that car. Big and sporty.
Before I reach the side gate, I spot Dan in the backyard, kneeling on the ground and tinkering with something. As I come through the gate, he stands, grabs his can of Budweiser from the window ledge, and takes a sip.
“Hey, Dan. Is Anna Mae home?”
“Hey, Dennis. She’s inside. Just go in the side door and on into the kitchen,” he says, one side of his mouth bulging with a wad of Red Man.
When I step through the side door, the room is pitch-black and cold, but I can see a glow beneath the kitchen door. It’s Tootie’s room. She often works the night shift at the Tampa P.D. and sleeps during the day.
I call out, and Anna Mae answers, “I’m in the kitchen. Come on in.”
“How are you doing today, Anna Mae?”
“I’m doing fine. I’ve just made a pan of fudge. Have a seat, and I’ll cut us a piece.” She motions toward the round kitchen table in the corner.
“This fudge is really good. It’s the sugary kind—Mama’s favorite. She says you make the best fudge.”
“It’s the Old-Fashioned Cocoa Fudge recipe that’s printed on the side of the Hershey’s Cocoa can. I love it. I love chocolate, but I shouldn’t be eating it. I’ll end up with a migraine.”
“What do you mean?”
“Me and the girls are allergic to chocolate. Something in it gives us migraines.”
“Even Snickers bars?”
“Even Snickers bars.”
“How’s your mama? Luewanza and Mrs. Murphy? I need to walk over and say hello.”
“They’re fine. Mama and Granny went to Jai Alai last night.”
“They asked me to go, but when Dan’s home from the dredge, I spend time with him. Did they win anything?”
“I don’t know. Granny was raising Cain this morning, saying, ‘That SOB threw the game. He missed the ball on purpose.’”
Anna Mae laughs. “We’re all suckers. It’s rigged. They know who’s going to win and who’s not before the damn game even starts.”
I really like Anna Mae. She talks to me like I’m an adult.
“Well, I’d better get going. I’ve been gone a while, and Grandma will start to worry.”
“Wait a minute. Take some of this fudge to Mrs. Murphy, Luewanza, and your mama. That way I won’t eat it.” As she wraps it in a piece of tin foil, she continues, “Tell Luewanza to call me later.”
“I will. Thank you, Anna Mae.”
On my way back to Grandma’s house, I decide to walk past the church before rounding the block. A few cars are parked out front, and I can hear someone playing the piano. Mama’s voice comes to me, singing, “I’ve got a mansion just over the hilltop.”
She is always telling me stories about how she, Anne Smith, and Barbara Jean Swilley used to stand in front of the congregation and sing.
“I’d often walk to church with Mrs. Charlotte and carry her Bible,” she tells me. “During Vacation Bible School, the church ladies made washtubs full of homemade fruit punch and served it with butter cookies. That was the summer treat we always looked forward to.”
When I walk through Grandma’s back door, she is visibly upset.
“Where have you been?” Her voice is shaky. “I’ve been worried sick. I’ve been calling for you for the past half hour. Your mama will be here any minute.”
“I was out visiting, Grandma. I’m sorry.”
She doesn’t say another word. She just pulls me toward her and hugs me into her lap.
That is where my walk through the old neighborhood ends—with Grandma’s arms around me.
Outside my window, darkness has settled in. The crickets are still singing, and a bullfrog has joined the chorus. Rain taps lightly against the tin roof. I am back at my desk, but the old neighborhood will linger in my mind for the rest of the night.
No matter how many years I live somewhere else, that family acre will always be home. The land may belong to me now, but some part of me has always belonged to it. Each time I walk through the door of the Allen house—now my house—the whole neighborhood comes flooding back to me.
Polly is sweeping the front porch. Jack Sharp is watching his stories. Mr. Allen, cigar in hand, is piddling with his Dodge Dart. Anna Mae and Granny are sitting at the kitchen table, catching up on the gossip around Riverview. Grandma is in the front yard, raking leaves in those blue velvet Hush Puppies with the hole in the side.
The night breeze carries the memory of night-blooming jasmine.
The old place looks different now. Most of the family homes are gone. So are the people who filled them.
Many of the grand old oaks remain. They are the gatekeepers now, standing watch, their Spanish moss hanging like Mrs. Charlotte’s cast nets, gathering the memories of lives once knitted together within the four blocks of the old neighborhood.
