Where Spring Hill Starts on a Saturday

By Jennifer Cordell

Saturday in Spring Hill does not announce itself with anything as civilized as an alarm clock. It announces itself with a mockingbird that has imprinted on your bedroom window and decided 6:47 a.m. is showtime. By the time you swing your legs out of bed and remember which knee hurts today, the lovebugs are already conducting their amorous business across the windshield of every parked car within a three-mile radius of County Line Road, and somewhere out on Mariner Boulevard, a guy named Dale is telling a complete stranger at the Wawa pump about his septic tank like they're old war buddies.

I'm telling you this because if you're new here — and we get more of you every month, hauled in on the back of a U-Haul with a Carolina plate and a stunned look in your eye — you need to understand that Spring Hill has a rhythm. It is not the rhythm of Tampa. It is not the rhythm of The Villages, thank God. It is its own thing, and Saturday is the day it shows you who it really is, if you know where to drive.

So here's the loop. My loop, for what it's worth, refined over a decade of getting it wrong before I got it right. You can do the whole thing in about four hours and still be home in time to argue with your spouse about lunch.

First stop: breakfast, and not the fancy kind

Start at the bagel place on Spring Hill Drive. You know the one. Strip mall, faded awning, a hand-lettered sign in the window that's been promising "FRESH LOX!!" since the Bush administration — and yes, both of them. There's a line out the door at 8 a.m. Get in it. Do not be the person who pulls up, sees the line, and goes to Dunkin'. The line is the point.

Behind the counter is a woman named Marlene who has been there for nineteen years and has two settings: warm and arctic. Which one you get depends on whether you order correctly. Order correctly. The correct part is "everything bagel, scooped, with veggie schmear, and a small coffee." Do not improvise. This is not a place for improvisation. The man in front of you who just asked for "the bagel sandwich, but on a croissant, and can you maybe do half cream cheese, half hummus" is about to learn something about himself.

The coffee is not great. I will say it. It is fine. It is medium. It tastes like it was brewed by someone who has nineteen other things on her mind, which she does, because Marlene is also running the register and shouting at her son in the back to "watch the toaster, Travis, watch it, Travis, I swear to God." But you didn't come here for great coffee. You came here for the bagel, which is, against all reason and Florida geography, genuinely excellent. Crusty, chewy, dense in the way bagels are supposed to be and almost never are below the Mason-Dixon. I once asked Marlene what her secret was and she looked at me like I had asked to borrow her car.

Eat at the little metal table outside. There will be a guy with a Yorkie. There is always a guy with a Yorkie. He will tell you the dog's name is Buster. The dog's name is always Buster. This is part of the experience and it is non-negotiable.

Second stop: the hardware store on Mariner

You don't need anything from the hardware store. That's not the point. You will, however, find that you do need something once you walk in, because something about the smell of cut wood and motor oil and slightly-too-warm air conditioning will unlock a memory of that one cabinet hinge in the laundry room that's been driving you crazy since March.

The big-box place out by the highway is fine for what it is, which is a warehouse where teenagers in orange aprons hide from you behind pallets of mulch. The hardware store on Mariner is something else. It's an organism. It has roughly forty percent more inventory than its square footage should physically allow, and somewhere inside it is a man named Ron, or Don, or possibly both — I have never been entirely sure if there's one of them or two — who can find anything you describe within sixty seconds.

"I need that little plastic thingy that goes on the end of the rope on a ceiling fan pull, you know, the —"

"Aisle four, halfway down, on your left, second hook, blue card, eighty-nine cents."

I have tested this man. I have tried to break him. I once asked for a left-handed metric something-or-other I made up on the spot, and he stared at me for a full eight seconds and then said, "We're out, but Tuesday." I still don't know what was coming on Tuesday. I suspect he didn't either, and we were both too proud to admit it. That's the kind of relationship you have with this place.

While you're there, look at the wall of seed packets. You will not buy seeds. You will think about buying seeds. You will picture yourself as the kind of person who grows tomatoes in the side yard. You are not that person. None of us are. The seeds are decorative. They are a dream we share collectively, like Powerball.

Third stop: produce, and a small interrogation

Cut over to the little produce stand on Cortez. It's run by a woman named Doreen who used to be in real estate and, by her own account, decided one Tuesday in 2014 that she was done with people and would rather sell strawberries from a tent. Doreen is a regional treasure, but she will not be rushed. If she asks you what you're making with the basil, you tell her. The full recipe. With substitutions. She will judge you, and her judgment will be correct.

Get the strawberries when she has them. They are not from California, where the strawberries are large and beautiful and taste like a faint memory of strawberry. They are from somewhere up by Plant City, and they are small and weirdly shaped and so sweet they almost don't seem real. Get the boiled peanuts too. Just trust me. If you're new to Florida and you've been avoiding boiled peanuts because the words "boiled" and "peanuts" formed an unholy alliance in your head, this is your sign. You were wrong. Boiled peanuts are a soft, salty, pleasantly weird thing that tastes like the South poured into a paper cone, and you will eat them in your car and get the brine on your steering wheel and you will not be sorry.

While you're paying, Doreen will ask you how your week was. She means it. Answer briefly. She will then tell you what's wrong with the county commission and you will agree with her, because she is right.

Fourth stop: the springs, just to look

Now you're going to do something that everyone who lives here forgets to do, which is drive ten minutes out toward Weeki Wachee and just look at the water for a minute. You don't have to go in. You don't have to rent a kayak. You don't have to commit to anything. Pull off, stand on the bank, watch the water do its impossible thing — that bright, cold, glass-clear blue that doesn't look like it should exist in a state where the air is currently 84 degrees and trying to drink you.

There will probably be a manatee. There is often a manatee. The manatee will be doing nothing in particular. This is the manatee's job, and it is excellent at it.

I include this stop on the loop because the rest of Spring Hill is a place where things happen — errands, schedules, the eternal small business of a Saturday — and the springs are a place where things don't. You need both. You especially need both if you've spent the morning being judged by Doreen.

If you have visitors in town, this is where you take them and pretend you go all the time. They will be impressed. You will not correct them. You will, in fact, gesture at the water as though you personally arranged it.

Fifth stop: coffee, the second one, the real one

Loop back toward town and stop at the little coffee place tucked behind the dry cleaner on Forest Oaks. You wouldn't know it was there if you weren't looking. Half the people who live within a mile of it don't know it's there. This is by design, I think. The owner is a guy named Felix who, depending on what day you catch him, is either a former Navy guy, a former chef, a former lawyer, or all three. He may have been making it up. He may not have been. Some questions are not for asking.

The coffee here is the opposite of Marlene's coffee. It is fussy. It is from beans Felix sources himself, somehow, from places he describes vaguely with a wave of his hand. The man will spend four minutes making your latte and you will let him, because the latte will be the best thing that happens to you all day, including whatever pleasant thing happens to you later, which it will not match.

He also bakes. There are usually four things on the little glass shelf, and you cannot predict what they will be. Last weekend it was a guava cream cheese danish, a savory cornmeal scone with rosemary, a brown butter blondie, and one — exactly one — slice of carrot cake that he was charging twelve dollars for and no, he was not negotiating. Get the danish. The danish is always the right call. If there is no danish, get whatever Felix tells you to get. Felix is never wrong about pastry. He may be wrong about his career history. Not about pastry.

Sit at the bench out front. Talk to your dog if you brought one. Don't talk to Felix while he's working the espresso machine. He's concentrating. He's curating. There is a sign behind the register that says "I'll get to you when I get to you," in a font so calm and so confident that no one has ever once complained.

The drive home, which counts

The drive home is not a footnote. It's part of the loop. Take the long way, down the road past the cemetery with the absurdly tall flagpole, around the bend where the egret is always standing in the same drainage ditch like he's waiting for a bus, past the church with the message-board sign that this week reads "GOD ANSWERS KNEEMAIL." Roll the windows down for at least part of it, even if it's hot, even if the AC just got the cabin to a livable temperature. The point is to smell the place. Cut grass, hot asphalt, that mineral wet-stone smell that comes off the springs and travels farther than you'd think, and the faint sulfur tang of somebody's well water from the open garage of the house on the corner.

You'll get home with a bag of strawberries, a paper sleeve of boiled peanuts, an unidentified hardware item you bought because Ron-or-Don implied you needed it, a danish you've already eaten half of in the car, and the peculiar contentment of having done a thing without really doing very much at all.

That's Spring Hill on a Saturday. That's the whole show. People keep asking me why I haven't moved somewhere fancier, somewhere with a real downtown and craft cocktail bars and a Whole Foods you can reach without an act of God. This is why. The loop is the answer. The loop, and the bagel, and Doreen, and the manatee doing absolutely nothing on company time.

Come do it. Wave if you see me. I'll be the one arguing with Felix about whether last week's blondie was actually better than this week's blondie. (It was. He knows it was. He's stalling.)