It’s ten o’clock on a Friday morning, early June, and 94 degrees in the shade. Under my shirt is a dew of perspiration.

“When she first lived in the house she didn’t have screens in the windows,” our guide, Sheila Barnes, says. Barnes wears the attire of a Florida Cracker of the thirties: shapeless print dress, no makeup, hair pulled away from her face. “She contracted malaria a couple of times. Later she installed electricity and the fans helped cool the place.“

We are standing on the front porch of the home of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (“It’s kin-NAN,” she would tell strangers) in Cross Creek, Fla. In 1928, Rawlings (1896-1953) threw over her newspaper job and moved to this primitive community some 20 miles south of Gainesville. Here she intended to grow and sell oranges while writing books.

Barnes nods to the typewriter couched on the handmade table with its palm log base. “Sometimes she wrote at this table all day long. She preferred writing in the summer because she wanted time off in the winters to hunt and tend her orange groves. People think of her now as an early environmentalist.” She smiles, her eyes glittering mischieviously. “She was also handy with her shotgun.”

Sweat now dripping down my back, I try to imagine Rawlings pecking at that machine in the sultry heat of an August afternoon. How, I wonder silently, did she ever remain alert enough to write while baking away in that sun-blasted air? Or had the heat itself helped give rise to such fine books as The Yearling and Cross Creek?

To the left as we enter the spacious living room is the liquor cabinet. “That was the only door in the house Marjorie Rawlings locked,” Barnes says. She tells us a few drinking stories about Rawlings. In Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings: Sojourner at Cross Creek, biographer Elizabeth Silverthorne writes that Tom Glisson, a friend of Rawlings, once heard an “outsider” remark that Mrs. Rawlings drank to excess. Glisson replied, “Why, yes, she’s real fond of it, and she’s got more sense drunk than most people, sober.”

Barnes points out the two mixing bowls hung by Rawlings beneath the bare electric bulbs to diffuse the light, then leads us through the bedrooms and the bathrooms. In the first bathroom, bare and plain by today‘s standards, she tells us how excited Rawlings was when she first had the plumbing installed. “She had a party here in the new bathroom. She filled the tub with ice and “soft drinks“ and put glasses on the sink. She stuck the dozen roses her uncle had sent in the commode.”

We walk down the hall to the guest bedroom, where luminaries like Robert Frost, Margaret Mitchell, N.C. Wyeth, and Gregory Peck, who starred in the film version of The Yearling, slept during their visits. I ask if Max Perkins, Scribner‘s talented editor who was a advisor and friend not only to Rawlings but to writers like Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, and Fitzgerald, had ever spent the night at Cross Creek. “No,” Barnes says. “Perkins was married and thought it would be improper to visit Rawlings alone.”

After touring the author’s bedroom and bath, we enter the dining room. Its formality and stained pine floors reflect Rawlings’s love of intimate parties. A gourmet cook, she took great pleasure in entertaining guests and was as passionate about her culinary arts as she was about her literary ones. “For my part,” Rawlings once wrote, “my literary ability may safely be questioned as harshly as one wills, but indifference to my table puts me into a rage.“ Standing there, I could easily imagine eight or 10 guests drinking highballs and eating fried catfish or quail on toast off Wedgewood china. “Rawlings always seated herself at the table facing the view of the outhouse so that her guests wouldn’t have to look at it.”

We ended our tour in the kitchen. Rustling up a meal on a wood burning stove in the Florida heat was surely daunting for Rawlings, I thought, but Barnes pointed out that Florida cooks at that time had done most of their daily food preparations early in the morning during hot weather.

Strolling the grounds after the end of the formal tour — the orange grove which once surrounded the house is gone, replaced in less than 50 years by a scruffy jungle of palmetto, pine, and scrub — made me think of the many passages from Cross Creek and The Yearling in which Rawlings combined her love of nature with her talent for written description.

Raised in the North, a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Rawlings seems an unlikely candidate for life among her “Cracker” neighbors (the name is derived from the sound made by the long whips of the early settlers driving their cattle to market). Yet from her first visit here she fell in love with the people and the land, and just as she made every effort to know the people, so did she bring a keen eye to the woodland around her home.

Few American novels can compare to The Yearling in terms of its descriptions of the environment and nature, and their role in the plot. In her biography, Silverthorne describes how Rawlings filled notebook entries with descriptions of the birds in her yard, the creatures who roamed the forest and grove, the exotic flowers and bushes. These careful observations brought a deep authenticity to her story and her characters. Here, for example, is a passage from the beginning of The Yearling:

The down grade tempted him to a lope. He reached the thick-bedded sand of the Silver Glen road. The tar-flower was in bloom, and fetter-bush and sparkleberry. He slowed to a walk, so that he might pass the changing vegetation tree by tree, bush by bush, each one unique and familiar. He reached the magnolia tree where he had carved the wildcat’s face. The growth was a sign that there was water nearby .......

Cross Creek, which Rawlings described as “a bend in a country road, by land, and the flowing of Lochloosa Lake into Orange Lake, by water,” has undergone some changes in the decades since Rawlings worked her grove and wrote her books. The sand road lays beneath a coat of asphalt; air-conditioned houses dot the pine forests. Yet her 80-acre estate and her writing remain a monument both to her and to the Crackers who once worked here. Her life, her books, and her home remind us that we are leaseholders, not owners, of the earth. At the end of Cross Creek Rawlings wrote

Who owns Cross Creek? The red-birds, I think, more than I, for they will have their nests even in the face of delinquent mortgages ...... It seems to me that the earth may be borrowed but not bought. It may be used, but not owned. It gives itself in response to love and tending, offers its seasonal flowering and fruiting. But we are tenants and not possessors, lovers and not masters. Cross Creek belongs to the wind and the rain, to the sun and the seasons, to the cosmic secrecy of seed, and beyond all, to time.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Historic State Park is in Cross Creek, southwest of Gainesville, on Country Road 325.