One fine winter Florida afternoon, Al and Nancy Larcom sit on the back porch of their stilt house in Port Tampa, a short drive from Old Tampa Bay.
Nancy calls it her "lucky porch" because Al carved shamrocks into the brackets under the eaves and nailed up the rusty horseshoe her parents found on their first date in 1946.
Al and Nancy married at 19. They met as little kids behind the Port Tampa American Legion Post 138, named for Nancy's uncle, Hugh Gilbert Strickland, the first Port Tampa resident to die in World War II.
Nancy can still see that day as if she had taken an Instamatic snapshot.
Al was launching a boat into the water.
She was smitten.
"I took one look at him and that was it," Nancy recalls. "I was done."
They hired a contractor to build their stilt house in 1973, the year they were married.
All these years, Al has worked next door at the Larcom Garage, which his father built in 1955.
Everyday, he's cut across the back yard for lunch, through an oasis of tangerine, orange and grapefruit trees, through the garden Nancy cultivated from ferns she's picked up on her walks through the woods and bricks she collected when a section of Rome Avenue was torn up.
In the mornings, Nancy sits on the porch swing and sips her tea. She can see the garage perfectly.
She's used to Al coming home for lunch. "It makes for a lot of dirty dishes," she jokes.
But she wouldn't have it any other way.
"There's nowhere else I'd rather live," she says. "Our roots run deep here."
Al and Nancy's house is really the center of the universe in what neighbors in this Port Tampa neighborhood affectionately call Larcom Land. Count the Larcoms.
Al, Nancy, Richard, Ted, Kyle, Edward. There are more, too. Siblings, children, a niece, two sisters-in-law.
More precisely, Larcom Land is a cluster of 16 small, tropical lots adjoining Larcom's Garage, where the family has repaired cars for nearly a half century.
The garage flourishes on its word-of-mouth reputation.
The Larcoms don't advertise.
Honesty, neighbors say, is their calling card.
Theodore Larcom, the family patriarch, migrated to Florida to work as a handyman at MacDill Air Force Base. He bought the first lot in the early 1940s for $25 and snagged a second one free in the deal. He built a no-frills cracker house in 1944 from used cypress lumber and Sears Roebuck shingles.
"It was a very small, little, rectangular house to begin with, but well built," Al recalls. "Back after the Depression, you were lucky to have a house at all."
Generations of Larcoms, including Al and Nancy's grown son, have since made their homes here.
A tiny, century-old Episcopal-church-turned-house stands as a landmark in Larcom Land. So does another historic home the family calls the "old railroad house."
"We just got lucky. Every time a house or lot would come up for sale, one brother or another would buy it," Al explains. "We never got far from home."
Al and Nancy worked to make the stilt house look very old and very Florida: "Like a fishing house or a beach house," Nancy explains.
The shamrocks commemorate Nancy's St. Patrick's Day birthday.
The sweet white picket fence they made themselves symbolizes the old-fashioned charm of a neighborhood they love fiercely and want to protect.
Nancy's grandmother, Blanche Strickland, used to regale her with stories about riding her horse in Port Tampa.
Her grandfather, Charlie Strickland, ran a fishing camp in Tampa Bay.
"Fishing was plentiful in those days, and he gave away as much as he sold," Nancy explains. "He took care of a lot of people when times were tough."
Nancy has known many of her neighbors since childhood, an era when Port Tampa was not an up-and-coming place to live, when kids at school used to tease, "What time zone is Port Tampa in?"
Al remembers that when they built their house, they had to go to a bank in Plant City for a loan because they couldn't get one in Tampa.
Now they're fighting to keep the neighborhood the way it was when nobody wanted any part of it.
A significant slice of local woodland where Nancy has hiked for decades will soon give way to a new, large development.
She mourns the loss, but knows there's little she can do.
"We are community activists in our own right," Nancy says. "We pick and choose our battles."
The couple successfully fought to keep the green space open at a nearby landfill, and Nancy hopes to restore the century-old band shell in a neighborhood Spanish-American War Memorial Park.
A campfire ring behind their house has always drawn friends and neighbors. On Christmas Day, they gathered among the papaya, avocado and mango trees, cooked oysters and grouper and drank Budweiser.
"A true Florida holiday," Nancy says.
Al turns 50 today. They'll celebrate with a campfire and weenie roast.
"Very casual," Nancy notes. "Nothing fancy."
She knows that Port Tampa friends will feel free to just show up at Larcom Land. "You can walk the streets at night and if you see a party, you know you can join in because you've known everybody for years," she says.
