DeFuniak Springs
There’s a hole in the middle of the square
in a small town in Florida, so round as to look human-made. Some say it was formed by a meteor, others, a sink-hole. Legend has it’s a bottomless pit to the center of the earth, black as pitch, never successfully plumbed by anyone who survived. That was before a geologic survey determined the maximum depth--sixteen feet. A quaint village was built around it to accommodate a Chautauqua branch, and still it stands, draped with Spanish moss from live oaks damp with hot humidity. Despite the depth of ignorance at its center, many schools came and went, making it Florida’s Athens in the early nineteenth century. The state’s oldest operating library stands sentinel over gloried archives. Stumbling upon the town on a trek to the glorious wide horizon of earth, sky, and sea at the end of the beached south, you, too, will gaze in wonder at the village lost in time: the caladium-edged brick walking path brooded over by hanging gardens of fuchsia, ferns, and bougainvillea in the deep southern cicadaed shade. But it’s the lake, like grief, that beckons as a Siren to Psyche-- attractive, dark, deceptively deep, echoing what we each forget: meteoric damage can be plumbed to create lovely communities of wisdom around it, for even sink holes harbor eternal springs that connect to oceans of care. © February 2018, Tess Lockhart. All rights reserved. |