A northerner acclimates to Florida
Wednesday, Dec. 20 | Essay and illustration by Diego Perdomo
This article is part of Atrium’s Winter 2023 issue. To view the print edition online, visit our Issuu here
A grizzled man smoking a cigarette in his Confederate flag adorned pickup truck was the first time I saw a Florida stereotype in the flesh.
It was 2015, and I had only been down I-95 a handful of times to get to Orlando. Florida was never a remarkable part of the drive to me. The Tri-State area and Washington, D.C. had comically aggravating traffic. South Carolina and Georgia had peanuts and peaches. Florida was just flat and long.
However, in the moment passing the man with his cigarette and flag, the incarnation of everything negative I believed about Florida only furthered my aversion to the South. As the stereotypical monolith shrunk in the rearview mirror, my family and I only observed in amusement, the only value we derived from Florida as New York tourists.
Two years later, we were on I-95 again. But this time, we weren’t tourists.
In December 2017, we made the 20-hour road trip down to Florida. Now that we would be here for good, I believed the stereotypes were about to become my reality. Tasked with a new life, all that occupied my mind was going back home.
It’s been almost six years since my family made its pilgrimage to Florida. Moving down for a better — or more accurately described as new — standard of living, I didn’t know if I had the right to complain.
I’d like to believe I adjusted to the climate here. Embodying the veneers of eternal sunshine and homeowners associations, life was condescendingly better. While not walkable, my neighborhood was picturesque with warmer neighbors. While having classes twice as long then the ones I was used to, school had more engaging extracurricular activities. While I had started to look past the northern superiority I fostered before moving, I still felt like my upbringing distanced me from my peers.
I can’t remember exactly when or even if the state began feeling like home. While I had lost the kindergarten-to-freshman friendships of my hometown and a seasonal wardrobe, the idyllic flora and the sense of community around football and marching band were things I unexpectedly began to value.
Breaking up the monotony of sunshine, cloudy days helped me remember what my family and I had exchanged. Despite loving the sun, I felt its constant bliss made me complacently comfortable. Without the gray, still, cloudless skies of winter, I would have never learned to appreciate the ephemeral changes in climate, the warm refuge of family gatherings and the satisfaction of biking to the top of a hill.
Sometimes I wonder if I was even supposed to end up here.
Before we moved, I never saw myself leaving the Northeast. Being raised in an unincorporated hamlet just outside of Queens, New York, I longed for city life. Personal space and a calm environment were negotiable when considering my future. I could never understand why people enjoyed warm weather. I preferred defiantly bundling up over letting my body adjust to the elements, because to me, comfort wasn’t something you settled with. It was something you made your own.
I learned these values from my parents. Like my mother, I thought the California heat was hot enough to melt people’s minds. From their relaxed speech to the pace they lived their lives, slowing down was something that agitated me. After my mother gave birth to me there in the wake of the 2003 San Diego fires, she returned to the cold where people didn’t comment on how she pronounced “coffee.”
Like my father, I believed New York was the premiere melting pot of opportunity and culture. Building a life in Queens, one of the most ethnically diverse places in the world, he would always tell me of the immigrant enclaves and bodegas he frequented as a salesman. Hailing from Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, he chose the cold over the warmth he had known his whole life.
And even my stepfather, who had always yearned to return to the warmth of Puerto Rico and connect to his Carolinian origin, saw how the cold’s opportunities were enough to pull him away from the sun.
The 2017 drive to Florida was characterized by a two-hour Jersey traffic block-up, an hour-long midnight parking effort in the Virginia cold and an embarrassing count of the times our two-car caravan ended up miles apart. As I couldn’t convince my parents to let me stay in New York, I saw these obstacles as the universe’s last stand to keep me where I belonged.
Reflecting my unimpressed demeanor toward the state, I slept most of the way through Florida. With lapses in my memory between the damp Jacksonville gas station to the swampy air around our house in Pembroke Pines, I missed out on witnessing the cities I would begrudgingly connect with one day.
Orlando was the first city to thaw my aversion to the South. Being the first place I visited in Florida, it served as a place with generally positive, if superficial, memories of visits to amusement parks. While I never felt a deep connection to Florida, there was certainly something inviting about its warm rain.
Further south in Port Saint Lucie, I discovered I wasn’t as alone as I assumed, meeting long-lost cousins and going to beaches I was too proud to admit were better than the rocky ones I grew up with.
We finally reached Broward at around 3 in the morning. Barely unpacking our things, it took effort to become comfortable in the house, like hermit crabs nestling into a new shell.
Every morning of the first month in Florida, I woke up in New York. Refusing to settle in, I would trip over the things I had yet to put away, turning on the lights to see a room that wasn’t mine. This attitude extended to my behavior, as I biked to my new high school and wore T-shirts in 50-degree weather.
When I went back to visit New York two months later, it was easy.
Instead of 20 hours by car, it was three hours by plane. There was no mocking country music played by my family members. There was just my music. On the ride, there were young people and families traveling with me instead of pickup truck drivers proud of a heritage I was fundamentally opposed to as a northerner.
What wasn’t easy was realizing New York didn’t feel like home anymore.