why Florida is saved from suburb hell

There's not much city to speak of here in sunny Florida. There are of course a few exceptions, the spikes of chain link fence poking from the crown of Spanish moss, the few metropoli in this nearly all-consuming wetland. Miami, of course, though I can't comment much, having seen little but the cruise terminal and a few seasons of Nip/Tuck. Tallahassee I suppose deserves to be up there, being the capital and all, though in my opinion politicians and drunken college students does not a city make. Jacksonville does not count, because it smells. Really. This may seem illogical, but if a paper mill miles outside of city limits can overpower all other impressions of a place, then the place can't have much to impress. Orlando's downtown is an afterthought, built up to try to distract people from the fact that they came to the veritable middle of nowhere because of a cartoon mouse. And last but not least, Tampa, my hometown.

Tampa has one of those downtowns that has office buildings, restaurants that are only open from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., and nothing else. But from here on it spreads, sometimes more than an hour's drive in all directions: the greater "Tampa Bay Area." Read: suburbs. Miles of strip malls and subdivisions, as far as the eye can see. Normally this sort of setup has me itching with anxiety, searching vainly for non-existent public transportation to take me far, far away.

But Tampa is saved from suburb hell by the simple fact that we are in Florida. Beaches with sand as fine as flour and warm green waters are on the other side of the four-lane highways. Palm trees, black against a sky bright yellow with sunset, rise impossibly far, impossibly thin, twice as high as the rows of two-story houses. The hottest summer afternoons are relieved by massive storms, purple and black and inescapable, that rumble in, first thickening the air with potential, then shattering it with thick, hot drops of rain, falling like grain from a sliced sack.

You'll emerge from a series of condominiums to suddenly rise over a bridge, and there will be the setting sun, staring at you like an inverted pupil, a reaching light instead of a swallowing dark, its sunset iris spreading around it. You'll look away for a moment and then it will be as if the sky blinked, but took its eye with it, and there will be nothing left but the perfect line of sky and sea.

There are houses that instead of grassy backyards with swing sets have an ocean and a dock. Dolphins and manatees are as common here as squirrels and songbirds are in that more ordinary yard. My far more typically suburban childhood home has no cookie cutter fence and postage stamp yard but a swamp and a sunbathing alligator outside my back door.

This is why coming home to Florida, even though it is the suburbs, is truly like a breath of fresh air. And this is coming from a girl who clears her head with city smog.