"We're here."
These words still echo softly in my mind when I drive down Wilkinson Road late at night, in the spring, when the sultry air is still thick with the perfume of some exotic species of vine or bush or tree. We used to arrive late at night, during Spring Break, after driving sometimes twenty four hours from Washington, D.C. to my aunt's house at Beneva and Wilkinson.
At that time there were hundreds of orange trees in commercial groves, from Cattlemen Road almost to Beneva. I would inhale their perfume in response to my mother's soft words, awakening me and my brothers, in the back seat of the car, still hypnotized by the long drive south. We would emerge from our exhaustion to the excitement of seeing our relatives, of experiencing Paradise in the midst of winter, of being someplace indescribably beautiful and exotic -- and warm.
When I was growing up (and my mother's sister, and her husband, and my six cousins lived here), at the intersection of Beneva and Wilkinson the roads were only two lanes each. The atmosphere much more simple by comparison than it is today. One half mile south, at the point where Beneva met Proctor (currently a place where twelve lanes of traffic negotiate their intercourse on a moment by moment basis), the roads were at one point only "shell pad". If you haven't lived on the Gulf Coast, you may not be familiar with that term.
Shell Pad is a road bed or driveway surface made of perfectly formed miniature sea shells. There are few places in the U.S. where people have delivered in dump trucks those tiny treasures that most children seek during their most revered vacation.
Sarasota is one of them.