My grandmother, in her own way, shines like a beacon down the stormy American past. She was a bootlegger in a little county up in the state of Washington. She was also a handsome woman, close to six feet tall who carried 190 pounds in the grand operatic manner of the early 1900s. And her specialty was bourbon, a little raw but a welcomed refreshment in those Volstead Act days.

She of course was no female Al Capone, but her bootlegging feats were the cornucopia of legend in her neck of the woods, as they say. She had the county in her pocket for years. The sheriff used to call her up every morning and give her the weather report and tell her how the chickens were laying.

I can imagine her talking to the sheriff: ‘Well, Sheriff, I hope your mother gets better soon. I had a cold and a bad sore throat last week myself. I’ve still got the sniffles. Tell her hello for me and to drop by the next time she’s down this way. And if you want that case, you can pick it up or I can have it sent over as soon as Jack gets back with the car.

‘No, I don’t know if I’m going to the firemen’s ball this year, but you know that my heart is with the firemen. If you don’t see me there tonight, you tell the boys that. No, I’ll try to get there, but I’m still not fully recovered from my cold. It kind of climbs on me in the evening.’

My grandmother lived in a three-storey house that was old even in those days. There was a pear tree in the front yard which was heavily eroded by rain from years of not having any lawn.

The picket fence that once enclosed the lawn was gone, too, and people just drove their cars right up to the porch. In the winter the front yard was a mud hole and in the summer it was hard as a rock.

Jack used to curse the front yard as if it were a living thing. He was the man who lived with my grandmother for thirty years. He was not my grandfather, but an Italian who came down the road one day selling lots in Florida.

He was selling a vision of eternal oranges and sunshine door to door in a land where people ate apples and it rained a lot.

Jack stopped at my grandmother’s house to sell her a lot just a stone’s throw from downtown Miami, and he was delivering her whiskey a week later. He stayed for thirty years and Florida went on without him.