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ELIZABETH BETTENDORFDriving uninvited onto the heaven the Durrances have nurtured for three decades will earn you a long cold look.
PALM RIVER - Wayne Durrance long ago perfected what he jokingly calls "the look."
It's a narrowing of the eyes framed by an unsmiling mug, delivered by a guy who spent years honing it as an undercover narcotics detective.
He inflicts it on anyone who drives uninvited down his pretty dead-end street and turns around on his lawn.
"It happens sometimes eight or nine times a day," he says with a sigh, "especially on weekends."
For three decades, Durrance and his wife, Teresa, have lived on Ferry Lane near the Palm River.
Originally named for the ferry that docked on the river in the old days, the lane now attracts a steady stream of real-estate gawkers. Some are lured by the mansions sprouting up along the water. Others are intrigued by the Durrances' manicured 7 1/2-acre yard bordered by a white, three-rail fence and visible almost as soon as you turn off Palm River Road.
"Look at it. It's like a little piece of heaven back here," Mrs. Durrance says. "A lot of people think it's a park."
A spring-fed pond stocked with bass, bream, catfish, perch and all kinds of turtles meanders through their yard. Swings hang from shade trees. A pedal boat off the dock awaits the brigade of grandkids who also live on Ferry Lane, as do a handful of extended family members and a few of the Durrances' best friends.
"Guests say, "Oh my gosh, it's a different world,' " Mrs. Durrance says, tossing fistfuls of Wonder Bread to the fish one hot July afternoon.
She is 56years old and grew up in Palm River, a block over on Maydell Drive.
She's one of those rare people who has lived out her life within a mile of where she was born. Her father was a commercial fisherman. Her grandparents owned the land she lives on now. In the corner of the yard sits a historic cottage that they also owned. Today, family friends own the cottage, which is probably 100 or so years old.
"When I was a kid, I had a little old canoe and I used to paddle up and down this pond," she recalls. "Now my grandkids fish in the same pond."
The Durrances built their house back in 1972 on 1 1/2 acres of land given to them by Mrs. Durrance's parents. The plans were from a builder's model she had spied on State Road 60 in Brandon and promptly fell in love with.
The couple scrimped and saved for the down payment.
"Oh, you should have seen how it looked in those days," Mrs. Durrance says, "Harvest gold appliances and cabinets, lots of dark wood work, shag carpeting. We thought it was beautiful. Of course, at that time it was."
The 1,700-square-foot home cost $29,000, recalls Teresa, a former beautician who now works for a real-estate title insurance company. The brick Florida ranch house was a bargain at the time, but they didn't know it. Recently, a large, new home nearby on the river was listed for $850,000, she says. Lots with no waterfront have fetched $65,000 and $70,000.
Fed by Six Mile Creek, the Palm River remains a little-known ribbon of water in East Central Hillsborough County. It's the river that's clearly visible from the Lee Roy Selmon Expressway, the one that always triggers a "What is that exactly?" reaction, usually at 60 miles an hour.
But people on Ferry Lane know the river well and the Durrances say few choose to leave it.
"At one point," Wayne Durrance says, "We made a decision to stay here for the rest of our lives."
Over the years, the couple saved their money and bought more adjoining land. They cleared every inch of the property themselves, engaging in hand-to-hand combat with vines, potato plants and briars. The pond was so quilted with hyacinths that "you couldn't see it," Wayne Durrance recalls. "It was really, really rugged."
They created their masterpiece of a yard with an ax, a shovel and a couple of rakes. They yanked out brush with a chain they hooked to their car.
Caring for it all still demands serious sweat equity.
No yard workers for this pair.
Mrs. Durrance shows a blister on her right hand from a weekend of yard work.
"It's a 24-7 job taking care of it," she says.
After mowing on a recent hot Sunday afternoon, her husband collapsed into a green Adirondack chair at the pond's edge.
"Teresa, this is killing me," he remembers saying.
An hour later he was making more plans for the yard.
Typical, he says. He works the massive yard until he can hardly bear it, then makes plans to do it all over again.
The couple's two sons grew up to love the property, climbing trees, fishing and swimming in the pond. Their three young grandchildren are growing up on Ferry Lane, too.
Regular trips to the Wal-Mart Supercenter in Brandon are a fact of life, Teresa says.
Besides copious quantities of fruit rolls and juice boxes, they go through 10 pounds of peanuts a week for the squirrels, 50 pounds of corn and millet a month - for the ducks - and an additional 25 pounds of bird feed every other week.
Those cartoonish pileated woodpeckers are regular visitors to the property. So is an old, crippled duck they call "Broken Beak," which the grandkids have cared for since it was a chick.
For all of this, Wayne Durrance says he is willing to put up with tire tracks on his lawn.
At 57, he's retired from the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office, with plenty of time to practice "the look."
Sure, there are bigger and better houses out there, some with smaller yards.
But he's not budging.
"We've always said that we love this place because it's so beautiful," he explains. "Oh, sometimes we think about going to Europe for a few months. But you know what? We'd spend the whole time thinking about our yard."