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April 22, 2.017 My mother, my brother and I moved to Roseland when I was five years old in December of 1959. My grandparents lived there then, as did many retired couples, and we lived for awhile with them in their house which was almost directly across the street from the Roseland Community Center until my grandfather built us our own small house.on the lot behind his. He and my grandmother owned the adjoining lot to the center and my grandfather was part of the community which did upkeep there for the building and the lot and the dock. At that time, the center was used as a meeting place for the Woman's Club and the Garden Club, I believe. It was also used as a polling place and there may have been other organizations which met in the building including the Power Squadron which my grandfather was a member of. Many of the retirees had boats and used them for leisurely rides on the beautiful Sebastian River. I can also remember going to the center for parties, bridal showers and baby showers, decorated with local flowers and with food served which had been prepared in the kitchen there. Things were quite different in those days. Although it shocks me now to find the very heart of Roseland, the part where the Community Center still stands, very much unchanged after almost sixty years, the surrounding area was mostly still wild. Sebastian had one grocery store and the elementary school, which I attended and where my mother taught. There was a gas station on the corner where the Publix shopping center now sits. Joy and Ralph Holtzclaw ran a tiny store which sold the most basic of necessities and lived in the back of the store. There was one restaurant in the entire area and it was at attached to a motel. Melbourne and Vero were the "big" cities where one went if one needed anything out of the ordinary. There was hardly any TV reception then and few people had TV. Air conditioning was a rare luxury, and these retirees were strong and able people, spending their days growing citrus and other "exotic" (to them) plants, working on their houses, and sometimes going to the beach for picnics. Their lifestyle, in fact, was not that much different from that of the others who lived in Roseland then- fishermen and their families, electricians, carpenters, tradespeople. My best friend's father was a barber who had a shop in Wabasso. Now of course, things are different but as I said, the very heart of Roseland remains much the same although many of the old houses have actually been restored and look better now than they did all those years ago! And I love coming back to visit, to walk down the still -sandy road by the river, to remember who lived where, where we played marbles and hopscotch, and to go by the old Community Center where I spent so many hours as a child with my friends, mostly on the dock where we fished for catfish with rubber worms or gummy balls of white bread or simply lying on the warm boards, imagining pirate ships coming down the river, and buried treasure, and gazing at the islands where surely Tarzan must live. It was magical And so much of the magic of my imagination sprang from books I had read and where I had learned to love them came directly from that Community Center which in those days housed a tiny library which was run by one of the women's groups for the community. I doubt they had two hundred books there. Probably far fewer. But even Sebastian didn't have a library! It was only open as a library one night a week and I remember as if it were yesterday, walking the short block with my mother and my brother to check out books, following the beam of a flashlight though the darkness. There was only one children's bookcase and it wasn't long before I had devoured every book in it and soon, Mrs. Mockeridge, the woman who was usually there to check out our books, to stamp them with her date stamp, began to allow me to read "adult" books which she carefully chose and discussed with my mother before she allowed me to take them. I will always love her for that and I will always remember the excitement I would feel when I held a book in my hands that I'd never read before, it's weight and even smell a promise of a new world which I was about to enter. So for me, that little building is the very heart of where my love for the written word began and the land around it, the river behind it, were all a part of the two things which have never failed me in my life which are words and nature. No matter how hard he tried, my grandfather never could quite tame the jungle of what grew and crept and slithered there in that lot on the river and what a gift for me and my friends that he couldn't! I remember we used to build rafts out of whatever we could find right there beside the dock and although we never actually launched one, the business of building them launched dreams of exploration and discovery, just as did the books inside the building. That entire little place on earth seems somehow enchanted to me and every time I come back to visit, I always check to see if a certain pine tree which got struck by lightening still stands in its place beside the building. It does. I remember when it got struck and how that tree smoldered from its wounded trunk and then, how it healed and the tree still stood, still grew, as deeply scarred as it was. It still grows, it is still beautiful. It still offers shade and, for me at least, inspiration on how to live and even thrive after grave damage has been wrought. To me, it bears witness to the life of Roseland as it stands guard over the Community Center which also still stands, although I am sure that time has wounded it, too, it still offers a place for people to come together to meet and to join in community. It still, it would seem to me, has a place there in that community. It represents not merely a building meant for utilitarian purposes but also history.