The Fantasy of Ca' d'Zan

I always loved this magical estate as a kid, but returning was even better

- THAO THAI

IT WAS a lovely, cool-for-Florida fall afternoon when I returned to Ca’ d'Zan. A thin mist fell through the cluster of banyans, slipping past the canopy down onto the roots. There were 14 of these trees in total, but it was hard to tell each one apart, so twined were their limbs. They were planted around a century ago, when the circus tycoon John Ringling and his wife, Mable, took up residence in their sprawling new winter estate in Sarasota, Florida. With each passing year, those trees grew more enormous.

Standing amid their branches, I had the sense of being sheltered from time. I existed, momentarily, in a space where the past bled into the present and where the impossible became possible again. I could almost catch the echo of my younger self. There I was, stooping to smell a yellow rose in Mable’s beloved gardens or sneaking a teenage kiss on the grand marble terrace as the Sarasota Bay lapped behind me. With my back against a banyan tree and a notebook in my hand, I once spun the stories that I hoped would someday spirit me far from Florida.

The irony is that those stories eventually made a life for me as an author in the landlocked Midwest, yet I could never escape the fever dream of my home state. In my debut novel, Banyan Moon, I wrote about the sticky heat of the coast and red tide eating into the shoreline. I described abandoned arcades and kitschy secondhand stores, along with vast, decaying estates. The Florida landscape only became more vivid the farther I traveled from it.