Home by Another Way Read online

  There is racing up and down the roads and trails that go up and down the mountain in the center of the island. Some is done by people on foot, and some is done by people on bicycles. If you ask them, they say they are having fun. I do not put much stock in what they say, however. Running and biking fall into the work category, as far as I am concerned, not the leisure category.

  We have been told that there is horse racing down at a track on the southeast side of the island. We have seen the track, and we have seen pictures of races. But between the island time and the island calendar, the races have not ever been held on the days we expected them to be, so we have not actually seen any horse racing.

  The other racing sport is the unofficial-yet-fiercely-competed racing the taxi drivers do when a plane is coming into or going out of the island or someone is running late and demanding a quick trip from the driver. Any excuse to drive fast is welcomed by a taxi driver anywhere on earth, from Manhattan to the Leeward Islands.

  When adjusting to island time, it helps to keep in mind that the major sport in the islands is cricket. It helps to remind yourself that a single cricket match can go on for days, and no one cares. And every couple of hours or so, the people who are playing and the people who are watching take a tea break. People who take tea breaks in the middle of a sporting event are people who are not in a hurry. The game will continue, but first you have to wait for the crumpets to be passed around.

  Waiting is something one has to get used to on St. Cecilia.

  We got a craving for nacho-cheese Doritos one afternoon while we were on St. Cecilia. We knew they sold them here; we had devoured a bag by the pool one afternoon the week before. So we got in the car and headed down the hill to Princetown to the supermarket.

  After a few minutes of looking through all the bags of chips that were on the shelves and having no luck, we finally went and asked a cashier.

  “Come back on Tuesday,” said a nice woman with a nice smile. It was the smile she reserves for newcomers who do not understand how the island works.

  “Tuesday?”

  “Yes, the ship comes in on Tuesday.”

  There was a brief moment while I wondered whether or not the Doritos people had their own fleet.

  “The supply ship comes on Tuesday,” she said.

  “But today is Wednesday,” I said, hoping that my incredulity at having to wait a week for nacho-cheese Doritos was not too apparent.

  “Yes,” she said, ending the conversation. So we went home to wait for the ship to come in.

  When we are here, we wait for Daisy to check on her daughter before we catch our boat. We wait for the man who owns the convenience store to put his book down and come in from his lounge chair to take our money. We wait for the supply ship to come on Tuesday so we can get the things we wanted from the market that were out of stock on the Wednesday before.

  We wait for the goats to cross the road so we can get to town. We wait for the rain to subside so we can go back to the sun. Occasionally we wait for a chef to report for work so we can order the dinner we were hoping to order an hour earlier when we came to the restaurant.

  With all of the waiting that we do in the country where I was born, we Westerners are still not very good at it. We all seem to like hurry better. Or at least I did, until I discovered island time.

  My life in the States slows down more each time I return from St. Cecilia. It worries me in a way.

  I worry it is because I am getting too old or too lazy or too something to get up every day and push harder, the way I did when I was younger. I find myself saying, “Well, that’s enough for today,” much more quickly than I used to. I worry that what I have done on some days—as a husband and a father and a neighbor and a writer—is not actually anywhere near enough.

  I have also observed that I am less willing to leave my house to go anywhere that is more than about ten minutes away. If I cannot find it or participate in it or discover it within that radius, I am inclined to forgo it all together. If you want me to travel farther than that, then it had better be good.

  I want to eat at the same few places, and I want to see the same few faces. I want there to be less filling up of my days and more letting the days just come and wash over me. I am less inclined to attack the day and more inclined to simply let the day have its way with me. I want to be sure I sit in the stillness and see the show open in the morning and watch the show close in the evening from a quiet spot with a quiet heart.

  I expect there are equal parts fatigue and maturity, age and laziness all mixed in there somewhere. I also suspect that my priest and my psychiatrist and my publisher, not to mention my mother, would all tell me there was something else, something maybe even troubling, if I had the courage to ask their opinions. Though I know that each of them, in his or her own way over the years, has told me clearly that one of the secrets to this adventure is to find one’s way to being something at least as much as doing something. I trust that they have been right all along.

  I am becoming less enamored with all things that move fast. I have noticed that I have been missing stuff while I am hurrying my way to other stuff. Lately I have begun to understand that unless I do something about that, it will only get worse.

  I am tired, too, of hurrying up just to wait. I am ready just to wait.

  My children are off on their own now; my house has grown quieter; there are fewer people coming and going. I wish I had some of those days and nights back. I wish I could go to the ballpark and watch my kids play and sit by the pool or on the beach with them for a whole afternoon. I wish I could see my son wrestle again, and I wish there were buddies over to spend the night, all crowded onto the floor upstairs. I wish my daughter were still in high school so we could be out on the softball field together every day for months at a time, the way we were for four years.

  I wish I had gone more slowly through those days, and I wonder what I missed because I did not.

  I am increasingly aware that the things I treasure the most are not out there somewhere waiting for me to hurry up and get to them, but rather they are here with me and beside me and near me, waiting on me to be present to them.

  They are waiting on me to change time zones, waiting on me to set my clock to island time.

  Three

  That still, blue, almost eternal hour

  before cockcrow, before the baby’s cry,

  before the glassy music

  of the milkman, settling his bottles …

  —SYLVIA PLATH

  The first thing you hear in the morning on St. Cecilia is the birds. The second thing you hear is the drone of the fishing boats down in the straits as they head off to the fishing grounds.

  When you hear the birds and you hear the boats, then you know first light is coming, and if you want to see the show, then it is time to get moving.

  Wherever I am, at home in Tennessee, or on the road working at a conference or retreat, or down here in the islands, I like to begin my day at first light. Some of God’s best work is done around sunrise, and I hate to miss it.

  On the island I tiptoe around Seastone, the cottage we like the best, gathering up coffee and a prayer book and a sketchbook and a pen and a lapboard, and go to sit down by the pool, cross-legged on a chair. I call this the scribbling round.

  Many years of beginning my day when the day is beginning have taught me that the lady I live with prefers to let the day be a little farther along before it disturbs her. I like listening and watching as it whispers and blinks and stretches itself to life. She prefers to sleep until everything is already purring along nicely.

  For all of that, I have never actually seen the sun come up out of the sea on St. Cecilia. The sun pulls its way up from the Atlantic side, the windward side of the island, back behind us. Back where the beaches are rocky and wild and windblown, where the surf pounds its way to shore after the long run from Africa, where the trade winds that bring gentle breezes to our side of the island can blow you over if you are not holdin
g on tight to something. But all of that is hidden by the long hill behind Seastone. The cottage faces north and west, looking over the straits toward St. Catherine and down over a quiet strand into the placid waters of a bay beyond which is the place where the sun slips into the sea each evening. We are along a cliff about 150 feet above the water, looking down onto a stone beach and then out into the straits.

  The way the cottage lays into the hill you cannot see the sun itself until ten o’clock or so. What you can see during the scribbling round is the way the sun lights up the sky in front of you to the west, sending out long fingers of pink and red. You can watch it begin to burn off the mist that keeps you from seeing St. Catherine and down the coast of St. Cecilia.

  You can watch as the direct light from the climbing sun begins to back its way toward you. First down the side of the hill across the bay, lighting up the houses that run down its side, turning them from dark and gray to bright and colorful. The line of the light keeps backing across the bay toward you, turning the water in the cove from green and dark to gold and blue.

  The light from the sun keeps coming at you until suddenly you notice you are sitting in full sunlight. That is how you know the scribbling round is over.

  Sara’s first task in the morning is to feed her flock. She has either been adopted by, or managed to adopt, a crowd of small birds who nest in the tree by the porch railing. If you leave the doors open, they will come on in and head for the kitchen and make themselves at home. It is possible they own the house and someone neglected to tell us.

  Sara begins her mornings with coffee and something to read and a bite of breakfast, no matter where we are. On St. Cecilia she gathers up her things and heads out to the porch. It takes about six minutes tops for the birds to show up along the railing, looking to see what is on offer for breakfast.

  These are small birds, about the size of house finches. St. Cecilians call them sugarbirds. In general, being a bird means being on the go constantly, as near as I can figure, and it is especially true of sugarbirds. The name itself suggests a clue as to why they are so hyperactive—too much sugar in anything that small leads to a great deal of yapping and crashing about. Anyone who has ever been around small children can testify to the often startling behavior changes in normally well-behaved children that result when you give a small being a large amount of sugar.

  Sara will lay out some crumbs of bread along the rail, and the birds will go back and forth between the railing and the tree. If she is slow to bring the bread, they will come right onto the table and walk up to the edge of her book and cock their heads and stare at her. Once they badger her into delivering a snack, they will set to haggling among themselves over who gets which piece and when. I am unable to determine the pecking order, but there certainly must be one.

  They are not the only animals for whom this cottage is home. There are lizards living around the pool deck, and they spend their days skittering along the fence rails and lying in the sun on the tiles around the pool. Most often we see them out of the corner of our eyes as they zip past. There is one lizard living on the top shelf of the bookshelves in our bedroom. There is a potted plant that he uses as home base, I believe. When I am no longer unnerved by his staring at me as I read at night, then I know I have begun to relax and my vacation is upon me.

  There is a cat that belongs to the people who own a house on the point of the headland below Windbreak. They are not always there when we visit; we have only seen them a couple of times. We know when they are there though. He is forever touching up the paint on his house, which is not particularly remarkable. What is remarkable is that he wears only a hat while he is doing so. He is sort of a legend around here.

  As near as we can figure out, they are away for a month or two at a time, and the cat is left on her own. So when her people are away, she wanders up the hill to see who is in for vacation. Seastone is the first cottage she runs into as she comes up the hill, and she will hang around for a few days hoping for a handout and some company. She spends most of her time under our car in the shade, but sometimes she comes closer.

  One day after shooing her off our porch, I tried to explain to her that I am not a cat person. I have made the same argument to the cat that lives at our house in Tennessee when I am trying to get her off my lap or out of my closet. Both cats, all cats, look at me as though they do not understand why I still think that it is the person who decides whether or not they are a cat person.

  Between the sugarbirds and the lizards and the cat, I sometimes feel as though I am vacationing at a game preserve. It is a feeling that is intensified by the occasional mongoose sighting and the herds of goats that walk along the road below us and the dogs that belong to the manager, the dogs that come around for a visit every morning. They think of themselves as canine concierges and drop by every bungalow at Windbreak every day to make sure that all is well. They cannot do anything but be cheerful and glad to see us—dogs are like that—but it is a nice gesture on their part.

  There is also a family of monkeys living at the top of the hill. One of them—the head monkey, I assume, though I only assume it because he is the tallest one—will work his way through the property at night and then down to the shore. On the way back up the hill, on his way to get out of the heat of the day, the monkey stops by the cottages as he goes along to see if anyone has left something to eat that should be taken back to the rest of the family or something shiny that will look good in a monkey’s nest. The first time I saw him, he was standing by the kitchen door when I came around for my first cup of coffee, and it scared me half to death.

  One morning during the scribbling round, I had one of those moments when I felt certain someone was looking at me. I thought it was Sara, awake early for some reason, gazing fondly at me from her breakfast-and-bird-feeding station on the porch. She has grown used to my early-morning ritual over the years, and she rarely interrupts me.

  I am a romantic, both a hopeless one and a hopeful one, and being in St. Cecilia makes my romantic sensibility worse rather than better. There are times when I like to sit and watch Sara when she does not know I am watching her, and I have caught her looking at me often enough to like it when such a gaze is headed in my direction. So I did not look up for a long while, keeping my head down and scribbling away, basking in the glow of knowing I was being watched by the one I love and who inexplicably loves me. Knowing that if I looked at her, the spell would be broken, and I did not want that to happen.

  But the observer kept making noises here and there, and it became so obvious I figured that, for whatever reason, she wanted me to look in her direction. It turned out I had spent a half hour or so basking in the glow of a gaze from a monkey. It was eying my coffee mug, I think, when I started so violently that it was startled too, and the monkey took off up the hill.

  If you mention the birds and the lizards and the monkeys to anyone who lives on the island, they nod as though it is perfectly normal to share a cottage with wildlife. From time to time, as if to be reassuring, one of them will remind you that there are no snakes on St. Cecilia. I want to believe them, but I am unsure about the judgment of people who keep monkeys for pets.

  The end of bird-feeding time on the porch roughly corresponds to the time when the sun has finally worked its way high enough in the sky for me to be in the sun down on the patio, so I wander back up the stairs to say good morning and to find some more coffee. The sunning round is about to begin.

  It is best to do your sunning in the morning here. The sun is too intense in the middle of the day, and the early afternoons are for napping. Unless, of course, the scribbling round has worn you out already and you are compelled to take a short nap before lunch in order to be able to sit up and take nourishment.

  I do not know what it is about sitting in the sun that is so appealing. I do know there are feelings of warmth and of well-being that come with being browned by the sun, and I have not yet arrived at a place where I can pass it up.

  The sunning roun
d includes lunch, before or after or during. The choice varies according to the weather and the plans for the evening, if they have been made, and the estimated length of the napping round soon to follow. Those estimates vary according to the potential for rain, the hour one went to bed the night before, and whether or not one is still pink from yesterday’s sunning round.

  Some days we go out for lunch, most often to the same little place in town. We do that on the days we have to go to the market to lay in more supplies. And on Sundays we enjoy going out for brunch to a restaurant nearby that reminds us of one of our favorite brunch places back in Tennessee.

  But most days we make a sandwich or two and stay home. Fried bologna is the sandwich of choice when we are at the beach. We fell in love for all kinds of reasons. Discovering that we both liked fried-bologna sandwiches was simply the icing on the cake, so to speak.

  One of us will set the table on the porch, complete with books and something for the birds, who are working on their twelfth meal for the day. The other one will make the lunch. We will sit in the breeze and read our books and watch the straits for signs of changing weather and for the return of the fishing boats and the occasional sailboat drifting by on its way to the bay below. Or some souls who think they must be windsurfing or kayaking in order to have a good time.

  The good part about staying at Seastone for lunch is that it hastens the napping round.

  Ceiling fans are one of God’s great gifts to humankind. Cool sheets and two pillows and a book, the sound of the sea crashing and rumbling around on the rocks below, the clack-clack of the palms, the twitter of birds, and the occasional whistle of the breeze through the screens—all of these make for a perfect nap. Paradise is just another name for the perfect napping spot, I think.