Keith and Lynn Celee. PHOTO PROVIDED

pleblanc@breezenewspapers.com

Keith Celee has been on the island his whole life. This fourth generation islander has been a local UPS driver for almost 32 years now. In addition to a much higher population on the island these days, Celee said there has also been an influx of invasive plants and animals since he was a kid growing up out here.

“We’ve got all these lizards out here now that people have let go,” said Celee. “There are acacia trees down Stringfellow now that were never here. We have coyotes now that we never used to have, but we don’t really have quail like we used to.”

He recalls playing on piled up wood timbers from the Matlacha Bridge often enough to get big splinters in his bare feet, which were stained purple from trouncing on fallen plums from the trees across the street from where he grew up. Before regular garbage pickup began on the island, he said his family had to take their own refuse to the dump, where he often spent afternoons shooting at cans for target practice.

Much like any small island town kid, Celee’s childhood is filled with memories of going to the barber, hardware store, meat market and gas station, where he says the attendant was also the local fire chief. Among these memories, a favorite, he says, was seeing Santa Claus at the fire station.

“I grew up quail and rabbit hunting out here,” Celee said, “it’s just what we did during the winter. We had dogs with us. The quail is just not like it used to be. We went camping on Cayo (Costa) and Upper Cap (Captiva) a lot. I remember being on the beach without anybody else around.”

Like most island kids, Celee fondly remembers fishing, although he says you could keep what you caught back then with fewer restrictions on the size of the fish than there are now.

Traveling the island looked very different, as he says fiddler crabs lined the road, making it appear as though the street itself was moving. Growing up as an islander appealed to his sense of adventure and innate love of the outdoors, making it difficult to imagine growing up anywhere else.

“Kids these days like to play video games, but I was always outside, never inside,” said Celee. “We were always fishing or running around in the woods. We didn’t have video games to go play.”

Before there was a Winn-Dixie on the island, Celee remembers it was a really big deal when the family had to go into Fort Myers to do the grocery shopping, although he says a small island market carried some essentials such as milk and eggs.

Overall Celee admits he and his wife Lynn are very content, saying not much would change if they won the lottery, except maybe getting a place on the water with two boats. To people visiting the island or planning to move here he would like them to enjoy what they see.

“Don’t try to change things, just keep them the same,” said Celee. “People move here from somewhere else and they try to change this or that. There’s a reason they were drawn here.”