“Madness is only a variety of mental nonconformity and we are all individualists here.” Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

Been busy again. Friday night was drinks with the girls and Sat was nails, toes and shopping. Sunday was Mt. Dora. http://ci.mount-dora.fl.us/ First was Pisces Rising (http://www.piscesrisingdining.com/) for a great lunch. Then we stopped at Gate House Gift Gallery (http://www.lakeside-inn.com/the-gatehouse) where we bought bunches of stuff including jewelry, and even chocolate wine, on for a two hours boat trip on Lake Dora and the Dora Canal (http://www.doracanaltour.com/) for a great time. Finally The Lakeside Inn (http://www.lakeside-inn.com/) where we had drinks and snacks and listened to a group by the fire place doing an impromptu music session. By the way the main picture and the one above this paragraph are both from the Inn one from the porch of the Gate House Gallery and the other from inside the bar.

“We cannot live without the Earth or apart from it, and something is shrivelled in a man’s heart when he turns away from it and concerns himself only with the affairs of men”
― Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Cross Creek

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Watching Reruns in my spare time—Jamie (and Claire) miss ya . It’s DROUGHTLANDER TILL 2015: http://www.christiantoday.com/article/outlander.season.2.release.date.2016.latest.news.sam.heughan.talks.about.film.location.jamies.rape.scene/57206.htm

“Good” is what helps us or at least does not hinder. “Evil” is whatever harms us or interferes with us, according to our own selfish standards.”
― Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Cross Creek

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OK this week I’m gonna look at Authors That Made Florida Home:

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings:

Ms. Rawlings moved to Cross Creek in 1928, born in 1896, she grew up in Washington, D.C. She completed a A.B. Degree at the University of Wisconsin in 1918 and later married Charles Rawlings and moved to Rochester, N.Y. where she wrote a woman’s column in the local newspaper: “Songs of the Housewife.” She also tried writing harlequin novels.

“Who owns Cross Creek? The red-birds, I think, more than I, for they will have their nests even in the face of delinquent mortgages)..It seems to me that the earth may be borrowed, but not bought. It may be used, but not owned. It gives itself in response to love and tending, offers its seasonal flowering and fruiting. But we are tenants and not possessors, lovers, and not masters. Cross Creek belongs to the wind and the rain, to the sun and the seasons, to the cosmic secrecy of seed, and beyond all, to time…”
”
― Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Cross Creek

CROSS CREEK

“When I came to Cross Creek, and knew the old grove and farmhouse at once as home, there was some terror, such as one feels in the first recognition of a human love, for the joining of persons to place, as of person to person, is a commitment to share sorrow, even as to shared Joy.” Rawlings.

It was unusual for a young single woman to live alone in what was at this time (and hasn’t change a bunch since) in a virtual wilderness. She wasn’t originally alone but came to Florida with her husband Charles to reside at rundown farm they purchased near a little stream called Cross Creek. Charles was suppose to do the chores to bring the place from its poor state but in a years time he had left (and divorced her as well) her to fare alone in the little improved plot of land. Its reported that even her dog hated it so much she had to give him to city dwelling friends.

She stayed on and rented a small house on the property to a series of black and white tenants who were suppose to help her out, but generally just left her in a worse state and established a habit of sleeping with a firearm but she did eventually mange to get a nice citrus grove in and a vegetable garden in the back yard. Her cook and maid for 13 years also wrote a book: Ms. Parker with Mary Keating wrote Idella: Marjorie Rawlings’ “Perfect Maid” 1992, a frank story about working for the author.

Cross Creek had only a few other settlers–not even a village but just a loose group of homes (5 whites and two blacks) along a dirt road that lead to Island Grove. She eventually became friends with them. And she began to keep track of the people and events that made up civilization in the near wilderness in which they resided.

While living here she wrote stories about the people around her; she also collected recipes all an account of a part of America little known to the rest of the world.

However it wasn’t all friendship and roses–one of her neighbors (Zelma Cason) sued her for invasion of privacy for mention of her in her Cross Creek book ( where Rawlings implied she like to curse) and there was a long period of law suits which Rawlings finally lost (but her only fine was a dollar plus court costs. However the court and attorney fees were $32,000.) There’s book by Patricia Nassif Acton that describes the trail Invasion of Privacy: The Cross Creek Trial of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings 1988. Oh and Zelma and Rawlings did eventually became friends again.

She kept her home here for a retreat even after she moved her permanent residence to St. Augustine in the 1940s.

“He lay down beside the fawn. He put one arm across its neck. It did not seem to him that he could ever be lonely again.”
― Marjorie K“

THE BOOKS

Ms. Rawlings far from failed. Her book The Yearling (her most famous work about a young boy growing up in the nearby scrub) was excellent, published in 1938 it was very successful, made her popular and won her a Pulitzer in 1939.

She wrote several stories many of which appeared in When the Whippoorwill 1940 (one of her short stories won the O. Henry Memorial Prize in 1933)

She left Cross Creek when in 1941 she Married Norton Baskin and moved to St. Augustine and wrote her memoirs: Cross Creek. It is a timeless account of a Florida that is a classic.

She also wrote Cross Creek Cookery in 1942 where she complied recipes and food lore of the region as well as South Moon Under 1933: About a family growing up in the scrub country of Central Florida) Golden Apples 1935: About a young Englishman and two Cracker Floridians and Sojourner 1953: About a Midwestern farm life after the Civil War.

“Somewhere beyond the sink-hole, past the magnolia, under the live oaks, a boy and a yearling ran side by side, and were gone forever.”
― Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

THE MOVIES

The Yearling http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0039111/ was made into a blockbuster movie in 1938 and starred Gregory Peck and Jane Wyman.

“Gal Young ‘Un” http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079190/ was made into a short movie which won director, Victor Nunez, the Best First Feature Award at the Chicago International Film Festival.

Cross Creek http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085380/ with Mary Steenburgen, Rip Torn, Peter Coyote In 1930’s Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings moves to Florida’s backwaters to write in peace got 4 academy award nominations and was filmed in he area.

“Sift each of us through the great sieve of circumstance and you have a residue, great or small as the case may be, that is the man or the woman.”
― Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Cross Creek

THE PLACES

The Cross Creek State Park https://www.floridastateparks.org/park/Marjorie-Kinnan-Rawlings Here you can see a typical 19th c “Florida Cracker” house with its porches and breezeways to deal with the oppressive summer heat pre-a/c. and fireplaces for heat in the winter. This particular house contains Rawlings furniture including a table whose base is a cabbage palm. The home is open daily and there is a small admission in Hawthorne Florida. You can also wander the groves she had planted. Oh and the road, though still a small country lane, here is now paved by the way.

Antioch Cemetery http://www.marjoriekinnanrawlings.org/antioch.php After the problems with the law suits Rawlings became increasingly depressed and started drinking more and more heavily, she died in 1953 of a cerebral hemorrhage at her home in St. Augustine. She is now buried at this cemetery next to her second husband Norton Baskin. Antioch Cemetery on the outskirts of Island Grove, about seven miles east of her home in Cross Creek. She actually picked a different cemetery with the same name in Cross Creek, which she had picked out when she attended a funeral there for a friend. However the funeral director though her husband meant the Island Grove one. In fact this cemetery is closer her old home and contains more of her old friends.

Ocala National Forest http://www.fs.usda.gov/recarea/ocala/recarea/?recid=40186 Take The Yearling Trail: SR 19 to the east of Juniper Springs, drive north on SR 19 for 6.2 miles. The trailhead is well marked: Take a trek back in time to Pat’s Island on the Yearling Trail, a walk through the Big Scrub to an island of pine that the Long family once called home. This interpretive trail system leads you past a variety of historic structures, including an old cattle dip vat, a cistern, the remains of several homestead sites, and the Long family cemetery. In the center of it all is a giant sinkhole where the pre-1900 settlers collected drinking water.

Island Grove https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_Grove,_Florida this is the town that was Purley in Golden Apples.

Orange Lake http://myfwc.com/fishing/freshwater/sites-forecast/nc/orange-lake/ became Sawgrass Lake also in Golden Apples and real places like Lake Locloosa and the mythological named River Styx are also in her novels.

“Now he understood. This was death. Death was a silence that gave back no answer.”
― Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, The Yearling

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Norton Baskin wrote of her, “Marjorie was the shyest person I have ever known. This was always strange to me as she could stand up to anybody in any department of endeavor but time after time when she was asked to go some place or to do something she would accept -‘if I would go with her.'”