In Florida, the earth beneath our feet is like a honeycomb, dripping with stories— fossilized in layers of the world that has been. Sometimes, these stories are too big to keep buried, and Florida reveals them in dramatic ways.
I am a reluctant Floridian.
The first place that truly felt like home was a tiny apartment in a complex best known for a murder in the 80s. The teal carpet was stained with stories I never wanted to learn, fraying in the thresholds to rooms, the hallways tracked with litter from the frantic dance of cat paws. Hopelessly, I tried to vacuum every day. I had been too ashamed as a single mother to invite school friends over, as if entering our home was an intimacy that I wasn't ready for.
Eventually, we outgrew the apartment and had more budget to expand. Married to a native, we bought our first home in 2019, squeaking in right before the market skyrocketed. We had found an old home that we would be proud to make the place that held our children's childhood.
It was built in 1965, with shiny terrazzo floors, concrete flecks animated in the dancing of the morning light, walls that crumble when we try to hang normal things—like curtain rods—and old sliding doors that usher in drafts of humid Florida air.
One neighbor's lawn is overgrown with spreading bamboo, always finding its way into ours, and another's has chickens roaming through. Last year, our own neighborhood vigilante spray-painted "Down with DeSantis" as their after-dark activism.
The neighborhood sign was repainted last year, unsanctioned, and it is a terrible shade of aqua layered on rust. As distasteful as it looks, I feel precious about it every time I pass, because in our neighborhood [the Wild West, strictly lower to middle class, no HOA], someone took it upon themselves to make something they thought would be beautiful.
It's everything we could hope for.
In our neighborhood, we've given the children the life we hoped we could: bikes littered on front lawns, lemonade stands, exploring in the creeks, and movie nights on projector screens.
It feels idyllic at times. Simple, slightly feral, and a little nurturing spot for kids to grow that feels out of place in this digital era.
But in Florida, even ideals are tempered. The ground beneath our feet holds more stories than we realize, and sometimes, it decides to tell them in the most dramatic way possible.
In our quirky little neighborhood in 2020, sirens rang out, fire trucks littered the streets, as a sinkhole opened in a neighbor's backyard. My phone lit up with reports and concerned friends reaching out to see if it was near me. I stepped outside and saw my neighbor across the street. "Should I be worried?" He simply shrugged, "It's Florida," and returned inside his house.
"It's Florida," I reassured myself, trying to mimic his nonchalance.
More news came out: A pool had sprung a leak, and what followed was a sinkhole spanning about 100 feet wide and of unknown depth. Nearby homes were demolished. Insurance wouldn't cover it.
I began to watch the pool in our backyard with fervor, the water levels lowering. Last year, I told my husband I wanted our pool demolished. We'd build a garden, I said. Maybe then, I could not worry as much.
I've always had a morbid curiosity about natural disasters. I find myself consistently in awe of the power of the earth to make itself known.
During hurricane season, the Weather Channel is among my five most frequented apps. Tectonic plates shifting, tsunamis formed from the ocean's response to the roar of the earth, wildfires— I grew up reading news stories on each of these. But the one natural disaster I remained unfamiliar with was sinkholes.
And so, I followed my curiosity, and I searched for answers.
Experts explain the process of how sinkholes are formed: rainfall increases the acidity of groundwater, and the acid dissolves the limestone beneath the Florida peninsula into cavities. And over millions of years, the cavities have grown, the decay unfolding like the Earth's secret, while unsuspecting humans think the land they own was theirs to work into submission. And sometimes, the surface is sucked into the world beneath.
A friend told me about their new neighbor who had their yard scanned to see where they should place a heavy trailer. The report was grim. Their yard was like "Swiss cheese." The ground beneath the ground hollowing.
The unearthed fossils in Florida sinkholes have taught researchers much about Florida's history. In Devil's Den, a prehistoric spring, they've discovered fossils from the Pleistocene Age. A sinkhole formed near Tallahassee led archaeologists to believe humans settled in Florida as early as 14,500 years ago through the discovery of human-made tools.
Across Florida's sinkholes, researchers have found a treasure trove of prehistoric life. Of note: a Cuban crocodile, a 17-foot-tall giant sloth, an armadillo the size of a pony, and fossilized human shit.
Near the town I live, sinkholes have opened like tunnels to the past, fossils as old as 9 million years exhumed in the Earth's hungry inhale. Devil's Millhopper is a 120-foot-deep sinkhole that has been around since the 1880s. In it are remnants of marine life from the time when Florida was covered by sea. When it was first discovered and humans found bones and fossils at the bottom, the legend was born that the dead had gone down to meet the devil.
Standing at the bottom of Devil's Millhopper, it feels like a convergence of the layers of time— millions of years all within reach.
Florida is speckled with tunnels to the past.
I often find myself preoccupied with the layers of time. I wonder about the ground beneath my feet, the moments lived in this very spot. The people who stood here, and the secrets kept by the Earth.
Here: I write to you, curled up in my green armchair, the sunlight forming a haze on my left cheek through the sheer curtains. Narrated by the sound of a snoring dog, the air conditioner, and the soft conversation of birds speckled through my yard, arguing amongst themselves in the trees.
But also here...
Here: two eyes locked, an unspoken but shared knowledge growing, that this was not a moment they'd quickly forget.
Here: someone found their voice, buried amidst all the stories they've been told, and decided that they had enough.
Here: children's laughter rang out, the trees bowing, stretching their branches nearer to listen.
Here: someone said all the wrong things, unable to restrain their tongue.
Here: wine was spilled, tumbling from clinking glasses, ecstatic and love-drunk with celebration.
Here: someone raged in agony, the greatest heartbreak of their life, and they were forced to bear witness.
And here: someone's bones lie, tangled up in decayed fauna, fed on by tree roots, somewhere between where I stand and 100 layers below my feet.
I collect facts like my 5-year-old collects shiny stones. "Magic," she says as she holds out the pebble I purchased from Home Depot. Each tidbit I stow away, a tiny menagerie of wonder.
My curiosity leads me down rabbit trails when I "should be" doing something practical, like wiping the smudges of kid fingerprints and dog noses from windows.
Me: how much of human history is recorded
Google: Research suggests that only a tiny fraction of human history—about 1.6%—has been recorded.
Me: how many names of people from the past are recorded
Google: Until recent centuries, the names and stories of individuals were rarely preserved unless they were among the rich or infamous.
I am consumed by the thought of the stories never told. Or the ones that time has forgotten.
My fixation's origin is no mystery. It's in the face of the fragility of life. People die. Life is short. And sometimes, they die before they even learn about themselves: their favorite flavor of ice cream, that olives make their stomach turn, that they hope to someday make something that they will be proud of.
It's the people I love whose memory I would want to burn into our geologic layer. How could her spark ever be forgotten—a zest I wish I could capture and fuse to my soul. Or the way he thinks—studying, processing, and evaluating every line and curve with the care of a sculptor. The heart, the desire to do good, the legacy I would want to uphold and share, screaming to others: "Remember them. Learn from them. They are too good for you to forget."
The reality I live with daily is two-fold: profound and absurd. I wake up to write, stanzas ringing through my mind, only to step in dog shit.
But if life were merely profound, I would find it intolerable. The saccharine only can be withstood for so long before I have to sprinkle salt, like reading Rumi while my daughter plays a game with kittens who meow to the tune of Justin Bieber songs.
People in the past were more nuanced than mere stoics. Some of them had to be worried about the size of their ass, or rehearsing conversations to themselves before they spoke to their crush, or the mortification of their child publicly exposing them when they pulled a little too hard on their clothing.
And while I walk my dogs, them wildly untrained, tugging me along as they furiously snort every inch of the cement like lines of cocaine, we walk beside the chain-link fence that houses the sinkhole.
The standing water, home to tadpoles and various populations of mosquitoes, armadillos burrowing holes in the dirt nearby, a nature preserve in the middle of suburbia. And my mind drifts to what is held inside, the layers exposed to the open water, to life that had been long forgotten.
It now bears witness to the ring of bicycle bells and horns that honk as neighbors drive past. To the neighbor who plays their music a little too loud, and to the ones who snuck through the chain-link fence to put a rope swing over the water-filled hole.
My daughter and I started a butterfly garden this past year. We hoped to heal the dirt from the years it had been riddled with invasive plants and roots tangled underground like webs.
And so we sifted the once compacted soil, freeing it from it’s prisons, and we tried to bribe the Earth— gifting it with native plants, hoping that somehow, it would return the favor— allowing wildlife to be nourished, returning nature to how it was before we tried to bend it into submission, suburban lawns cut and watered just right.
We spent a lot of time out there— evenings after work and school, some early morning runs to the garden center when the caterpillars needed more milkweed.
My daughter is most at home in the outdoors, sweat gluing the hair that frames her face, dirt smudging her cheeks, lizards in hand as she whispers sweet nothings to them, “It’s okay, baby. You’re okay,” she says as they urinate on her.
And in the outdoors, where she plays and sings, she admires the marigolds and zinnias that slowing emerge in our landscape. Each bloom feels like a tiny dose of the magic, as if when given the right conditions, the Earth will find a way. As if history, broken loose within the soil, will bring life, once again, from its decay.
One day, everything I see will join the sediment, perhaps discovered by later generations of inquisitive minds whose ground opens up beneath their feet, who breathe in the dust of all that came before them.
Perhaps the people before us accepted that as their fate, as well. Perhaps they left traces, carved tusks, pottery, imprints in old pieces of wet cement, maybe they whispered to the earth to hold their secrets, to sing them out. To tell of the love they got to hold, the pieces of life that bore into them with blunt force, and the knowledge they gained—maybe that was enough for them. Realizing that the layers they stood upon were of ancestors and of hard-won wisdom. Realizing that someday, they too, would inherit their places amongst them, and be part of the scaffolding that upholds another generation and another, long after their name has been erased.
But someday, someone would stand on the ground their dust inhabits, and that someone would take a moment to wonder about them: about the stories trapped in their bones. And maybe they felt a peace in knowing that they're part of a whole, not just of humanity, but of nature, of trees whose roots would grow from their dust, fertilizing marigolds, picked someday by chubby fingers and pressed between the pages of books, preserved to whisper: "I was here."
And I wonder if I'll find peace when my time comes to an end. Not begging for more, but surrendering myself, inhaling knowing that I did what I could, exhaling: “I was here. And now, it's your turn.”
Lex, this was profoundly honest & beautiful as always. So thankful for your writing.