Letter From the Editor

By Marcy Nathan, Creative Director

When I was a child, my family rented the same house in Pensacola for one week every summer. The house sits right on the Santa Rosa Sound, surrounded by dunes covered in sea oats and switchgrass. You know how some people see a face in the façade of a house? It’s a phenomenon called pareidolia; it’s why you think the faucet in the tub is staring at you when you take a bath. We thought our beach house looked like a giant crab, with a covered porch for the mouth, windows for eyes, and a staircase and stilts for claws and legs.

There is a round Futuro “UFO House” on Panferio Drive near the crab house. It actually looks like a spaceship.

My grandfather set a crab trap 10 feet from the shore first thing every morning. He used chicken necks and turkey butts for bait, and secured it with a rope to a buoy. At breakfast he’d start a pool. Each of us got to pick a number out of a hat predicting how many crabs he’d trap that day. We couldn’t wait to see who won when he pulled the trap each afternoon. He made it a game. Instead of dumping the crabs into a bushel basket like most people did, he’d pour them out on the concrete under the house. The crabs would go scuttling, and we kids had to quickly collect them — and count them, of course, to determine which of us had won the pool. He’d taught us to step on them, then lift them from under their back legs to keep from getting pinched.

Most days, my sisters and I and all our cousins swam in the sound while the adults sunbathed a shell’s throw away. Pensacola sand is sugar-fine, and we built elaborate sandcastles for the conchs that washed up on shore at low tide, complete with underwater tunnels and moats. At least once a day we’d walk the stretch of beach around to the cove, filling baskets with shells of all shapes and sizes — including the occasional whole empty conch shell — or we’d walk the other way, down to the point by the tall condominiums.

Some days my grandfather would take us to the gulf, where we’d spend hours dodging undertows and jellyfish and, once, a stingray.

We rarely wore anything other than bathing suits, even when we went to the Pak-a-Sak within walking distance of the crab house, where we bought SweeTarts and candy necklaces and giant gemstone sucker rings. We occasionally went to the water park or a souvenir shop for tacky T-shirts. One year we even rented a motorcycle!

We finished a steady stream of puzzles, and spent our evenings playing cards. Gin rummy, mostly. Gin was also the adult’s drink of choice; my mother mixed hers with Fresca. On the weekend we had a card tournament, with matches spread out across days of play and a grand prize of $5 — plus a silver medal, which was back up for grabs the next summer.

As I got older we stopped going to Pensacola. I guess everyone just got too busy, or had other commitments, but my sisters and I have never forgotten those lazy summer days at the beach.

They say you can’t go home again but that doesn’t keep us from trying.

Last year, my sister Courtney and I went back to Pensacola. She and her family vacation there often, but nowadays I’m more likely to go to Destin or Orange Beach. As we walked the strip of beach from our hotel to the crab house we’d once thought of as our own, we talked about our mom and dad, aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents, gin rummy and gin and Fresca.

The house had been partially rebuilt after Hurricane Ivan, which hit Pensacola as a category 3 storm. I was relieved to see the owners had kept the same design, but disappointed to see that the house looked like, well, a house — just a house. But one still filled with memories.