Stef's family was having another one of what they call "working vacations". They had been invited to tour the Panacea Institute of Marine Science founded in 1980 by marine biologist Anne Eidemiller Rudloe. Way back in 1963, the Gulf Specimen Marine Laboratory had been founded by writer and naturalist Jack Rudloe, for the purpose of supplying marine specimens to scientists. His business was called Gulf Specimen Marine Company and built on property purchased the following year in Panacea, Florida, just east of Carrabelle. After Anne and Jack were married in 1971, the two worked together in environmental activism, writing both articles for scientific journals and popular reading. The couple co-founded and registered the nonprofit organization in 1980 and in 1990, the Gulf Specimen Marine Aquarium opened to the public. Getting to have hands-on, behind the scenes opportunities to work with scientists was thrilling for little Stef, and helped foster interest for all types of sea creatures. Stef learned that Marjorie and Archie Carr, friends of their hosts, had visited earlier that year, and they shared the latest about Archie's studies of the Sargasso Sea and where sea turtle hatchlings "go to grow".
Stef's family rented a cottage in nearby Carrabelle, a small gulf community close by the St. Vincent National Wildlife Refuge and facing towards Dog Island, a small island reached by boat and by car ferry. Their cottage along Gulf Avenue, was close to the Carrabelle Beach for early evening swims, and the Carrabelle Boat Club was a place where they could rent a boat for trips to Dog Island and to St. George Island, its bigger neighbor. The beaches on the islands were shallow and wide making it easy to pull a boat with outboard engines right up on shore for a day of shelling and setting up camp.
The rented cottage was next door to year-round residents on both sides, and the family with children quickly came over to greet them. Stef was glad to find someone the same age with whom to play. "Have you met 'old sourpuss', yet?" asked the dad. "No? Well she is something else. Must be one hundred years old. No, really. She is a real southern belle. Doesn't like Yankees, or music played outdoors, or people stepping in her yard uninvited." Stef's mom responded, "We've spent most of our lives in the South, and we'll be away so much of the time and tired when we get back, that I doubt she'll even notice we are here."
Mom was wrong and the Fulton family received an invite to come get acquainted delivered by the old spinster's housekeeper the very next day, and a visit between three and four in the afternoon would be perfect. So, they went over to say "Hello". And, all seemed neighborly, which was a relief, and they learned that the nickname "sourpuss" was the other neighbor's reference to the sour lemons that were the old lady's pride and joy.
Her Meyer lemon trees survived freezes thanks to the ancient glass framed greenhouse in the southwest corner of her front yard buffered by the freestanding garage that blocked the northern side. The dilapidated building had survived many a tropical storm, and some hurricanes, too.
All of her property was on an incline that raised up twenty-seven feet making it one of the highest elevations in town, and providing nice breezes off the gulf and an especially nice view of the small harbor close by. The lemons provided the essential ingredient to her homemade lemonade and icebox cookies made with lemon zest and her lemon slice pie. All of the family recipes had been handed down many generations, but the Fulton clan came to learn that the home had not.
No, the multi-storied home on pilings, with sun rooms and screened porches, had been purchased back in 1982, from the surviving family of a former colleague, another Florida State professor who had headed the math department at Leon High School before becoming an adjunct professor with FSU. The former owner had invited the lit-lover to visit, and the privacy and quiet, and gulf view won her over. Her desire to purchase the place was fulfilled just a few years later, when her colleague died and left instructions for the descendants to send word of its availability for purchase.
The present owner had been an English professor at FSU her entire career, all forty plus years, beginning when she was only 24 years old back in '49. The interior of the home spoke volumes in how much the spinster loved her literature. She admitted that to do over again, she would have fought retirement. Being in control of a classroom where she could extol the importance of great literature and make students work to her exacting standards, gave great meaning to her life. In retirement, she traveled in winter months with a great niece who enjoyed driving around the coastal regions of Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. From Fort Myers to Corpus Christi, they traveled to book fairs and special book lectures where she could meet and discuss with authors, and tell them how their books could have been better written. She liked to be helpful that way and was getting a reputation for her directness. Her other hobby was beach combing from Marco Island to Galveston, timing her beach visits around her book fairs, usually a three or four day trip. It was the old lady's obsession with shells that would lead to the false accusation.