I was born in a small one-bedroom flat on the outskirts of a small coal-mining town in the Florida Everglades. The year was 1953 and the economy was not doing too well. Father worked twelve hours a day, six days a week deep in the coal mines, and odd jobs on Sundays just to feed me and my nine brothers and sisters. Mother made ragdolls out of our old clothes and sold them outside of a feed-n-seed eight miles from our home. She walked there every day pulling a rickety old wooden wagon with three of my younger brothers and sisters riding in fine fashion. She'd have blisters on her hands every night from pulling that old wagon, but didn't mind...the young ones loved the ride so much. She wasn't much of a looker, but she made tasty biscuits and could cook a decent meal out of just about any critter you could catch in the swamp or find alongside the highway.

At night daddy would come home and drink his homemade Palmetto Wine until he hallucinated. He often imagined he was Jim Morrison and would sing old songs by the Doors. He didn't know the words very well, but we had fun watching him until one night, he fell face down in the canal behind our shed. After that, we had to tie him to a tree.

In 1964 the railway finally came through the Everglades. It sank of course, but was a sight to see with all that steam puffing out right before it exploded. Times were hard back then. I remember having to use a candle to view the monitor as we surfed the internet, where we took comfort in reading stories on Face Book of people who had more drama in their lives than us.

When I was 23, I finished high school and joined the Navy. Life was hard and we would work seven days a week, fourteen hours a day. Still, the pay was decent and the food was good. We visited many foreign countries and collected a lot of interesting artifacts to take home and share with our familes. I retired after 20 years and have been doing odd jobs of vinyl cutting, website creation, sandblasting and photography....

Life is good.

                                                                      ................squirrel??