In 1997, en route to a Key West vacation, my boyfriend Paul and I decide to veer off the long, dull, forward pull of I-95 for a look at Titusville, which in my memory is all gray and gloom, a soulless strip spiteful even when it was new. I figure by now it’s all Burger Kings and Winn-Dixies, but we might as well take a look. We drive off the exit ramp and—surprise!—Titusville’s idiosyncratic and undeniably pretty: big white herons pose in the shallows, tropical trees shade the lazy gardens, downtown is decently preserved and full of character, and the old Florida woman in the doughnut shop, her skin waxed and mottled by fifty years of sunshine, couldn’t be sweeter. There are a few little icons of the space years: murals of rockets, a high school team called the Astros, but it all seems to have settled into an unhurried calm, as if the dreamed-of boom never really happened and that’s just fine. We even find Hillcrest Drive, which is well preserved and rather optimistic looking, the lawns decked with palms and crotons and small boats polished to a sun-catching sheen.

In sum, Titusville’s attractive, balmy, and even marked by the sort of specificity of place which is getting rarer these days, which lets you know you couldn’t be anywhere else.

So what was all the fuss about?

The horizon of childhood is a little one; the small field at the center of which a child stands seems almost infinitely rich, but it is still a small field. I couldn’t see Titusville except through the dimming lens of my parents’ points of view, and until I went back—sheer serendipity—I didn’t understand just how shadowed their vision of the place had been. It makes me want to see the world, a little while, as they did, to understand what it was that loomed so large for them, that defined their Florida.

Every morning my father goes off to work in his sharply creased khaki pants. White government truck, white hard hat and chrome lunch box on the seat beside him, clipboard with schedules and figures involving the day’s work. They’re building on Merritt Island, a place that used to be a resort, but the government’s taken the houses now, and they fade and crumble into the jungle like Mayan ruins. The island’s a wild and snaky place; on the paved road through the swamps, you see rattlers hit by cars, stretched out on the asphalt, shorter than Arizona snakes, and big around in the middle, as if every one of them just swallowed a possum. Under one of the bulldozers at the site, my father said, a panther’s made her den; the engineers have seen her with her cub. Where, when the bulldozer moves and they haul in the sleek components of the rocket, will she go?