When I was just entering High School I fell in love with Marjorie Kinnan Rawling's book-Cross Creek.The book was kept in the side bedroom at my grandparent's farm between Fort White and High Springs,Florida-until I asked if I could have it years later.I was fully enchanted by Rawlings depiction of rural Florida life.It was from her that I actually owe my love of citrus-here is a quote from Cross Creek-

Quote:

I invariably put off all the orange picking as long as possible. I have watched the fruit so long, from the first blossoms in February, through the summer growth of the hard green balls, through the sudden swelling on the fall rains, and, with cool nights, the bright color showing. The oranges hang like lighted lanterns through the winter. I use the excuse of waiting for a better market, but I delay in fact only because I cannot bear to see them cut and the globes of light extinguished. Several times I have lost the entire crop in a freeze through my dilatory fondness.

I begged my parents to make a side trip to Cross Creek so that I could visit her home-then years later while a student at the University of Florida I got to know Mr.McLeod the owner of Silver Springs Groves which were right across from Rawling's home!He dated my apartment's owner Mrs.Joyce-so I was able to chat with him whenever he came over for a date with her! Back in the late '70's his property had the northern most commercial citrus in Florida-near Island Grove,FL- sadly the trees froze in the '80's-
I was able to see some trees at Island Grove that had survived the 1894-95 Big Freeze-but they too were killed in the '80's
Today there is a gift shop in Island Grove that sells fruit
http://www.crosscreekgroves.com/
I am tempted to buy from them just out of my fondness for this area!
I wonder if anyone here has a special appreciation for Cross Creek or Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings.

There are 5 or 6 short movies called Cross Creek, which are about wild horses in Australia.

The Cross Creek that I am referring to is in north Florida between Gainesville and Ocala with Orange Lake to the west and Lake Locklossa to the northeast-a tiny place with beautiful forest of live oak,magnolia and sabal palmetto that we Florida Crackers call hammock.Here is another quote from Rawlings book-"Cross Creek"-

Quote:

"Two o'clock and it's 28. Shall we turn the boys loose, or you want to wait?" "Turn them loose." The pine splinter torches flicker in the night. The men have been silent. Now they break into a chattering, like night birds roused from the day's sleeping. Their voices are sharp across the grove. The first fire blazes. There is rivalry to see who will first light his assigned fires and have them burning and smoking to cover his territory with the protective heat and smudge. There has been a great tension, and now, with the grove a pattern of blaze, it cracks. We are like soldiers, taut for the first attack, and sighing deep with relief to have taken over the first front with no casualties. It is important to have all the fires going before the insidious cold has dropped again too sharply. I have seen no more beautiful thing in my life than my orange grove by night, lighted by the fatwood fires. It is doubly beautiful for the danger and the struggle, like a beloved friend for whose life one battles, drinking in the well known features that may be taken away forever. The fires make a geometric pattern, spaced as regularly as the squares of trees. The pine burns with a bright orange flame and the effect is of countless bivouac fires across a low-wooded plain. The sky is sapphire blue, spangled with stars. The smoke lifts from the fires gray-white, melting into gray-blue, drifting like the veils of a dancer under the open skies. Each orange tree is outlined with light. The green leaves shine like jade. The round golden oranges are each lit with a secret inner candle. My heart bursts with the loveliness of the grove and of the night. If only, I think, I could watch such beauty unencumbered by my fears. Then I know that a part of the beauty is the fight to keep it, and that all good things do not come too easily and must perpetually be fought for. Our test is in our recognition of our love and our willingness to do battle for it. Sometimes the battle is hopeless. We burn all the pine, the great pile accumulated through the summer and enough, I had hoped, for four or five firings. One time it was all gone, and the men and I exhausted, by five o'clock in the morning, and the mercury was still falling. We could only stand and watch the embers die down and the blue smoke fade to tattered wisps, see day come in, gay and gaudy, and the temperature drop and drop, until the sun that had failed us was high in the heavens, shining over a tropical world solid with alien ice.

I guess I should read the books. I visited Micanopy, FL (which I believe is near the area you're talking about) and saw some stuff there about Cross Creek and MKR. It was a beautiful part of Florida. Maybe I'll start reading again.

Hello Jrozier,
Yes Micanopy is very close to Cross Creek-next time you are in the area you may want to visit Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings State Park- http://www.floridastateparks.org/marjoriekinnanrawlings/default.cfm
In nearby Citra Florida visit the Orange Shop-

http://www.floridaorangeshop.com/
And in nearby Island Grove visit Cross Creek Groves-
http://www.crosscreekgroves.com/IBS/SimpleCat/Locations/asp.html
Here is another quote from Rawlings-

Quote:

The road goes west out of the village, past open pine woods and gallberry flats. An eagle's nest is a ragged cluster of sticks in a tall tree, and one of the eagles is usually black and silver against the sky. The other perches near the nest, hunched and proud, like a griffon. There is no magic here except the eagles. Yet the four miles to the Creek are stirring, like the bleak, portentous beginning of a good tale. The road curves sharply, the vegetation thickens, and around the bend masses into dense hammock. The hammock breaks, is pushed back on either side of the road, and set down in its brooding heart is the orange grove. Any grove or any wood is a fine thing to see. But the magic here, strangely, is not apparent from the road. It is necessary to leave the impersonal highway, to step inside the rusty gate and close it behind. By this, an act of faith is committed, through which one accepts blindly the communion cup of beauty. One is now inside the grove, out of one world and in the mysterious heart of another. Enchantment lies in different things for each of us. For me, it is in this: to step out of the bright sunlight into the shade of orange trees; to walk under the arched canopy of their jadelike leaves; to see the long aisles of lichened trunks stretch ahead in a geometric rhythm; to feel the mystery of a seclusion that yet has shafts of light striking through it. This is the essence of an ancient and secret magic. It goes back, perhaps, to the fairy tales of childhood, to Hansel and Gretel, to Babes in the Wood, to Alice in Wonderland, to all half-luminous places that pleased the imagination as a child. It may go back still farther, to racial Druid memories, to an atavistic sense of safety and delight in an open forest. And after long years of spiritual homelessness, of nostalgia, here is that mystic loveliness of childhood again. Here is home. An old thread, long tangled, comes straight again.