St. Augustine

The really sad thing is they lost touch with most of their friends and families. Tragedies were reported from all over the planet. Roofs collapsing under the weight of the snow, transportation routes cut off, people simply freezing to death in absolutely frigid temperatures. The winter finally broke in late April, but it took till the end of may for most of the snow to melt, some places it was June before the snow was gone and that’s around Jacksonville. The cities to the north weren’t as lucky, winter still broke but the summer that they had was what would have been deemed a summer in the arctic.

A couple of my parents friends managed to survive and headed south as soon as they could, knowing we were in Florida (I was already alive by the time they made it and found us). A lot of services were in taters across the globe; news didn’t travel as fast though many means of passing information along were still in use. The Internet was still functioning to some degree and passing information along. TV and radio still worked so everyone got the full-scale horror of what had happened. Countries like Canada and Russia were virtually non-existent, those that had survived were moving south by whatever means they could but there was very few of them. I learnt more about this over the years growing up.

That summer it turned out was a good one, at least for me; I was born, and I was a healthy baby boy. So I guess when I said I was Canadian it was only half true because I’m also American because of where I was born. It doesn’t really matter because there isn’t all that much of Canada left for me to go back and visit.

We moved out of Jacksonville shortly after I was born, coincidentally about the time my parents’ friends found us. We headed south, we weren’t intending to go far but we wanted to get out of the city; the breakdown of services was more pronounced in cities, the police were simply not able to deal with the crime and looting especially when people ran out of money and lost their jobs. We moved to a town called St. Augustine; that’s where I grew up and that’s where we’re still living. Close enough to a city to get its support and to help support it but far enough away that there’s some isolation and safety.