By Joe Murphy
Fall in Florida is as miraculous, amazing and sublime as anywhere else in the American South. While we don’t shout fall from the rooftops with brightly covered leaves and frost on the pumpkins, our fall is just as transitional and meaningful.
Our fall keeps its wonders a little closer to the chest. Our fall demands that true adherents pay attention and have a sense of place that allows them to pull back the curtain on the bounty unfolding around them.
When November arrives, if we are truly blessed, hurricane season is quietly slipping away. Humidity, ever so slowly, drops. Temperatures begin the slide from tropical to temperate. The gathering darkness of evening arrives just a little earlier.
Of all the holidays one could associate with nature in Florida, Thanksgiving is surely the frontrunner. While any time spent outside in nature in Florida is a gift, the gift is surely sweeter when it comes wrapped in cooler temperatures, drier days and the quality of sunlight we are gloriously bathed in this time of year. Thanksgiving is the ultimate outdoor, nature-based holiday in Florida.
My family has always connected our Thanksgiving traditions to nature and outdoor recreation in Florida: Canoes and family paddling trips. Thanksgiving weekend meals in state parks, campfires with hot pastries and sandwiches made over the fire (otherwise known to those in the know as “pudgy pies.”). Bike rides, hikes and target practice in the woods behind my mom’s house.
With all due respect to Macy’s parades, football and Black Friday, those traditions could be observed anywhere. A Florida Thanksgiving occurs here, in this landscape, and grounds us deeper both in nature and in family.
Some years the heat does not break in time. Some years the wet summer means mosquitos are still thick and thirsty. But those Thanksgivings can be salvaged with beaches and freshwater springs, with some Sunshine State spirit and creativity.
My mom was the heart and soul of our Florida-based Thanksgiving. She planned the canoe trips, she sought out the hikes and she led us in our efforts to catch some holiday fish. She could cook and bake anything, led with love, inspired our adventures and ground us in traditions going back generations.
She passed away in May this year and I feel her loss deeply. I miss her every single day. As Thanksgiving approaches, I am confronting what tradition means when the matriarch is gone. I don’t want to lose all the things she built and nourished, but I can’t fathom pretending everything is the same. It is not. It surely is not.
Our family is struggling to find some new traditions that honor her memory but that acknowledge the incredible shift in our world that occurred. The ground shifted under our feet and is still shifting.
Over the summer we bought a small used camper, a 13-foot 1971 Shasta Compact. We christened it “Magnolia” in honor of one of my mom’s favorite trees, one she frequently planted in our youth. We are taking Magnolia on its maiden voyage over Thanksgiving break, a journey to Colt Creek State Park. I will be pulling Magnolia with my mom’s red Ford pickup truck. We do something different but connect it to the familiar.
I have convinced my somewhat reluctant and suspicious family to try another new tradition. We are going to cook and bake some of our holiday dishes with recipes from Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ “Cross Creek Cookery.” We have talked about it for years, and perhaps this is the year to embrace it.
Finally, we will gather all our extended family on the Saturday of Thanksgiving weekend for food and fellowship. My mom’s house is now empty, but we will gather in our home, another new tradition. And we will ensure nature is essential to our experience.
On Thanksgiving Day itself, though I plan on driving that red Ford truck to a sacred place, deep in the swamps and floodplains of the Suwannee River, and spending the day with my mom’s memory. I’ll wet a line in her honor. I will remember her for being her and embrace with thankfulness that I am blessed to be her son.
Joe Murphy is a native and lifelong Floridian who lives in Florida’s southern Nature Coast. Banner photo: Kayaks at a boat launch on Mac Lake at Colt Creek State Park in Lakeland (iStock image).
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