Cathy Barnette

“Fort Myers is a place without context. A clod of swamp torn from the hands of the Calusa and Seminoles, drained, razed, and carbon-copied from the cities surrounding it. A bit of Tampa. A bit of Miami. We’ll name it for Abraham C. Myers, a Jewish Confederate colonel who’s never actually been here. We’ll call it Fort Myers. It’ll be a stop on the Tamiami Trail (see what we did there?), a place to rest, not a place to stay. The people who spend time in Fort Myers, here on Florida’s southern Gulf Coast, are from Michigan, Massachusetts, Minnesota. Meaningful places. They fly south each winter to escape their frozen hometowns. They use their pensions to snap up parcels of this copycatted paradise a quarter acre at a time. They build ticky-tacky houses picked from catalogues, three-twos with pools shaped like jelly beans for the one week of spring when the grandkids visit. They landscape their yards with exotic ornamentals from Asia and South America, sprawling invaders that take over the native species, swallowing this land, this sun, as they multiply unchecked. They call themselves “snowbirds.” They arrive in a great migration each fall. Come spring, they flit off to where the grass is greener, unwilling to tolerate the summer’s choking heat. Unwilling to endure the season’s house-rattling thunderstorms and bloodthirsty mosquitoes. Unable to imagine summer here could be more; as sweet as lychees, as bright as mangoes glistening in the sun. Come spring, they fly back to their real homes up north, where people are Somebodies.”
― Annabelle Tometich, The Mango Tree: A Memoir of Fruit, Florida, and Felony