John’s River in East Jacksonville, Florida. On weekday mornings, I walked through a small woods of scrubby pine trees to a narrow blacktop road where I was picked up by a bus and, along with other children, driven to the local public school. When I returned home, I was met at the door by an elderly Scot housekeeper, Mrs. Lesser. She was the mother of a college friend of Mary’s. Mary, the owner of the house, was a young woman of means who was going to marry my father once his divorce from Elsie, my mother, was final. On hot afternoons I would go for a swim in the St. John’s River. My jumping-off place was one side of a decayed gray dock that rested on splintery posts. I would jump up and down on the rotting planks until four or five water moccasins, poisonous snakes, slithered down the posts and dropped in thick tangles into the river. Mattie, a boy my age and a friend who lived nearby on the river, instructed me in how to do this. At the beginning of my stay in the old house, a variety of people, mostly relatives, came to occupy its barely furnished rooms: my father alone for a few days, then my mother for a few days, then her mother—my Spanish grandmother—for a week, then Mary, whom I met there for the first time.
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