Pilgrims We stumble through the door of our new Florida home at two in the morning, doubled over from exhaustion. My father and grandpa follow closely behind, parking the U-Haul down the street. That makes seven of us in…
When I moved to Florida from rural Wisconsin at twelve years old, I had no real sense of what I was stepping into. My picture of the state came from family vacations and commercials that made it look like a place designed for leisure, a place where everything was bright and simple and easy to understand. I carried that image with me until the day we arrived. The reality was different. The humidity felt like something you had to wade through and neighborhoods seemed to sit on top of the ground rather than in it. Even the light had a strange quality that made everything feel slightly overexposed. I remember trying to understand this new environment and how long it took to feel like the pace of the place made any sense at all. On top of that, of course, there were the bugs.
When I first started writing “Lessons in Entomology,” I believed I was working on an essay about the bugs and about Florida itself. I was struck by the feeling of a place that seemed to operate on its own perpetual current. I wanted to understand how a landscape can train a person to pay attention, and how certain details stay with you long after they should have faded. Those elements remain in the finished piece, but they moved into the background once I realized the essay was pulling me somewhere else. The outer world made room for the inner one I had been putting off, and the writing shifted toward what had settled beneath the surface of those years, waiting for me to finally look at it.
The story behind the essay has as much to do with the church as it does with Florida. When I returned to those years as an adult, I found that the memories would not separate themselves neatly, no matter how hard I tried to divide the physical landscape from everything else happening around it. Writing about Florida meant writing about the church, not because I wanted to collapse the two, but because that is how the memories arrived: inseparable, layered, and full of the small details I missed when I was young. It is strange how certain environments train you to pay attention in ways you do not fully understand at the time.
Florida and the church were noisy in different registers, and together they created a world that felt both familiar and out of step with anything I had known before. I did not keep track of what belonged where. Bugs rarely show up where you think they will.
GABRIEL HOLTON lives near Chicago and works in nonprofit communications. Originally from Florida, he writes essays and fiction.
