A stop on the Florida Black Heritage Trail: The John H. Hurston House in Sanford.
Zora Neale Hurston’s father lived in this Second Empire style home while he served the community in Sanford as minister of Zion Hope Baptist Church in the 1890s. Later, the house, located at 621 E Sixth Avenue in Sanford, was a maternity home for local mothers.
Cruising the Florida panhandle for a photo series documenting ruin and revival on the Southern roadside.
Thunder here among the pines and red hills is the song of summer. Listen long enough and you will hear its song in different keys throughout the day. Thunder at 7:00 in the morning sings a gentle song of relief, of decisions you need not make, heat you need not endure. On a weekday morning this song is colored faintly with regret. It is a lullaby the armchair by the window hums softly to itself as you clamber through the door and leave for work. Thunder at noon is puckish, a cymbal crash to punctuate your lunch hour or send you scurrying to the pavilion at the beach clutching your shoes and towels. At day’s end here thunder sings the loudest, conducting a fanfare for the setting sun diva as it dips below the closed-curtain horizon.
At night thunder sings the sweetest song. A song of space, of longing, and distance. A song of life.  Â
I’m always inspired when I visit the St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge. I’ve posted photos before, and I made a Minute Wild video just upriver last spring, but somehow I forgot to post these photos when I hiked the trail out to the old ghost town of Port Leon in February. Maybe it’s because I recorded something like twenty-five voice notes about the hike for a collection of travel essays I’m working on, and I didn’t even know where to begin. For this post I’ll just let the photos speak for themselves.
C.B. Crenshaw 