Excerpt from A TREE BORN CROOKED by Steph Post

Originally posted on REVOLUTION JOHN:

Crystal Springs, population six thousand on a good day, hadn’t changed much over the past thirty years. It wasn’t that it was a town stuck in the past; it just didn’t know what to do in the present. The town’s single claim to fame was that Elvis Presley had once spent the weekend there on his way to Orlando. The motel where he had stayed, the Sweet Dreams Lodge, still charged extra for tourists to rent out the room he had slept in, but no one came to Crystal Springs because of Elvis. The town was a place to pass through. On the route from Gainesville to Lake City, college kids and exhausted tourists stopped to get gas, eat a quick meal and buy some cheap souvenirs. Most didn’t stay through the night.

Occasionally a pack of University of Florida students would feel like slumming it and come up from…

View original 926 more words