Florida is a melting pot. Everyone is from somewhere else and they all think it was better where they came from and try and do things here like they did “back home”. They all come here from different states and even countries speaking different tongues and as a local boy it’s saddening to see what parts of Florida have become.
Born and raised in Ft. Lauderdale, lived there until 1986 except for a couple of breaks for the Army and college.
The summer is deathly hot and humid. In July/August you can walk from an air conditioned house to an air conditioned car and be sweating by the time you get to the car. Most every day the thunderclouds build up over the Glades, move east over the coast, rain like a cow pissing on a flat rock for a half hour, then go away leaving steaming roads and more humidity. You can drain the swamp and build houses but the environmental conditions that made it a swamp for a hundred thousand years are still there. If you live even a few miles inland then you're living in a manicured lawn, strip malled swamp. You never really get used to the heat, you just get where you don't mind sweating.
Winter in S. Florida is gorgeous and is why the snowbirds first came and why people move there. The whole outdoors is air conditioned, highs maybe in the 80's but lots of days in the 70's and balmy tropical nights with the moon shining through fluffy cumulus clouds. If you're fortunate to live close to the coast (we lived about 1 mile inland) you get a nice on shore breeze. A cold day is 60 degrees. It does get down a bit colder occasionally, but a light windbreaker is generally all you might need.
The biggest problem with south Florida is that it has no soul, or it lost what it had sometime in the early 70's by my reckoning. So many people came from somewhere else, "home" was always somewhere else, never Florida, so people had no connection to it, they didn't treat it like it was something precious where their roots were. Except for my sister, I was one of only about a dozen people I knew who was born there. Utica, NY filled with umpteen generations descended from Irish, Italian and Polish immigrants has a soul, small farming and ranching towns in ID have souls, Skippyville, AL has a soul. Boise did have a soul but it's pretty much completely Californicated away now.
Like thousands of other towns and areas across the country, S. Florida used to be a really nice place to live. In the 50's and first part of the 60's it was still old south even though it was never a part of the genuine old south, but close enough. Snowbirds came down and snarled traffic for 5 months each year but they brought lots of money so that was tolerated. Now it's Los Angeles East except the gangs aren't Mexican. Last time I was down there walking through a mall I counted several different languages and variations, Cuban Spanish which is distinctly different from other Spanish, various flavors of "other" Spanish which is different from Cuban, German from tourists, Haitian patois, New Yawk, New Joisey, Canadian and old England English. Can't recall hearing any real southern accents, though.
No place in America is like it was. Twin Falls has Muslims. I was planning on moving back to Fruitland, ID when I retired but now I see that the overflow from Boise is even spilling into that area. Old time Boiseans don't like California newcomers. North Carolinians don't like the influx of Floridians moving in to get away from the increasingly crappy areas of SE Florida. The population across the country is only going to get bigger and folks will move away from whatever overcrowded place they live in to find one of the fewer and fewer uncrowded places which is like their home used to be.
If you live in a small town or a rural area, savor it as much as you can while you can.
