From the shawl-draped easy chair in her front room, Edith Norman keeps close the things she needs most: framed photos of her late husband, Eddie; a well-thumbed Bible; and a snapshot of the neighbor woman she took care of for five years when she fell ill.
She still answers the jangle of a black rotary-dial telephone. One day last week, she clipped out a recipe for a lemon pie she plans to bake for a church luncheon.
At 90, Norman is lucky to enjoy the good health - save for the arthritis in her knees - of someone half her age. She considers herself even luckier to still live in her own house, the same one she has lived in since she was 14.
She moved into the white-framed, two-bedroom cottage in Hyde Park North with her mother and aunt, shortly after the family migrated to Tampa from the Panhandle town of Marianna in 1926.
Her street, a few blocks from the Willow Street exit of the Lee Roy Selmon Crosstown Expressway, was once part of a primarily African-American neighborhood. It was known as Dobyville.
The road was sand and palmetto trees grew in the middle.
"See, all this was a black neighborhood, there weren't any whites," Norman says. "The people worked for private families as domestics and cooks."
Norman went through the eighth grade at Booker Washington School, riding a streetcar where whites in the front made her move to the back and sometimes stand. After school, she took in laundry. Like her mother, she eventually went to work as a domestic for a wealthy South Tampa family.
Years later, she still remembers the street addresses, the children and the family professions like it was yesterday.
She married Eddie Norman on the front porch of her little house. She sat on that same front porch one recent afternoon, sunlight and warm breeze stirring the memory of that day.
They didn't have much money; Eddie worked as a longshoreman, loading and unloading bananas and oranges from ships in the Port of Tampa. So, the preacher, the Rev. Gray, from the Missionary Baptist church, married them right at home. They were going to find a place of their own to live, but Norman's mother told them to save their money, that there was room enough for three in the little house.
Decades later, Norman still wears her slender, gold wedding band, its tiny nub of diamond still sparkling perfectly when she presses her hands together. They always wanted children but never had any of their own.
"There just weren't any kids for me," she says. "I used to think everybody had children, but they don't. I got to take care of other people's children."
Once, she and Eddie built another house in West Tampa but decided not to move at the last minute.
"I just couldn't leave," she recalls. "I had hardly spent a night away from here. Young people move all the time, but me, I guess I'm just a homebody."
She still leases the house they built to tenants, this time to a girl who lost her job and now can't afford to pay the rent. Norman lets her stay for free.
"Before she lost her job she always paid right on time," Norman says. "Sometimes you have to just give it up and help someone else. I've been helped a lot in my life. My life may not be lavish, but you know, I get along all right."
Her husband, Eddie, died in 1988 after a bout with Alzheimer's that left him wandering the Crosstown Expressway looking for the way to work, Norman says.
"I miss him a lot," she says. "When he was alive I never had to worry about anything. Now I worry about everything."
Like the real estate speculators who call and write almost daily trying to persuade her to sell the family house. Maybe she can't keep it quite as clean as she used to, she says, but it's nice, a place she can call her own.
A nursing home? Please.
Don't make her laugh.
"When those real estate people call, I tell them, "I'm staying right here until the good Lord calls me home.' "
