Praise for

Robert Benson

“In looking at his own life with candor and hope, Robert Benson helps us to look at our own. His words have the ring of truth.”

—FREDERICK BUECHNER, award-winning author of more than thirty books, including Wishful Thinking

“Again and again, Robert Benson speaks to my heart.”

—LUCI SHAW, writer-in-residence, Regent College, and author of Water Lines

Praise for

The Body Broken

“The pathos of God for the torn and tearing body of Christ has seized the heart of Robert Benson. This book is a pure, passionate, and prophetic cry to transcend all division and discord into reverence of one another in obedience to the Master.”

—BRENNAN MANNING, author of A Glimpse of Jesus

“The Body Broken takes us on a journey for the sake of the journey itself, and in the process, it teaches us about loving one another, not by imperative, but by example.”

—from the foreword by JOHN FISCHER, author of Love Him in the Morning

“In a thoughtful and beautifully written volume, Benson challenges each of us to reexamine what it means to be a follower of Jesus in the diverse body of Christ.”

—DAVE BURCHETT, author of Bring ’Em Back Alive and When Bad Christians Happen to Good People

“It is a great irony that all of us who love Jesus and know that he prays for us, even now, that we ‘may all be one,’ have such a difficult time loving one another. Robert Benson doesn’t exactly tell us how to do it, but he does tell an honest story about the ways that Jesus’s prayer is getting worked out in his life.”

—EUGENE PETERSON, professor emeritus of spiritual theology, Regent college

ALSO BY ROBERT BENSON

Between the Dreaming and the Coming True

Living Prayer

Venite: A Book of Daily Prayer

The Night of the Child

The Game: One Man, Nine Innings, A Love Affair with Baseball

That We May Perfectly Love Thee

A Good Life

The Body Broken

HOME BY ANOTHER WAY

PUBLISHED BY WATERBROOK PRESS

12265 Oracle Boulevard, Suite 200

Colorado Springs, Colorado 80921

A division of Random House, Inc.

While this is a work of nonfiction, some proper names have been changed at the discretion of the author.

Copyright © 2006 by Robert Benson

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

WATERBROOK and its deer design logo are registered trademarks of WaterBrook Press, a division of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Benson, R. (Robert), 1952-

Home by another way : notes from the Caribbean / Robert Benson. — 1st ed.

p.     cm.

eISBN: 978-0-307-49978-3

1. Spirituality. 2. Vacations—Caribbean Area. 3. Benson, R. (Robert), 1952- I. Title.

BV4501.3.B465 2006

248.4—dc22

2005034964

v3.1

This book is for Miss Jones,

originally of Merigold, currently of Sunnyside,

and of St. Peter’s Parish as often as she can be.

Wherever she is going next, I shall be beside her.

And it is, as always,

for the Friends of Silence and of the Poor,

wherever and whoever you may be.

Contents

Cover

Other Books by This Author

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Author’s Note

It is a place for being, not doing.

For the most part you just watch.

You feel the sun on your skin.

You do the things God intended.

—HELEN STEVENSON

One

The first cold wind of winter

is flapping in my clothes,

showing me the way with the

direction that it blows.

—JAMES TAYLOR

The first time we came to this part of the world, the man who was supposed to meet us at the airport was not actually at the airport when we arrived.

It was raining and it was dark. Our luggage was trapped in customs because it was so late. The customs man had evidently gone to get something to eat. There was a person or two trying to be helpful to us in a language the guidebook had promised was going to be English but turned out to be unlike the sort of English we had heard before.

We had been traveling for fourteen hours by then, and the fifteenth hour did not look promising. Especially to a couple of folks who were trying to celebrate a wedding anniversary.

We were married in the month of October on a bright and sunny afternoon. To celebrate our wedding, we made the long drive from our home in Tennessee to the coast of Carolina. We spent a week together in a cottage on an island in the Outer Banks, doing not much more all week than reading books and taking naps and lying in the sand.

When our first anniversary came around, we talked it through and decided that rather than buy each other gifts every year to mark the occasion, we would give each other the week off and head for the beach again. It has been a dozen or so years now, and the amount of time has gone from a week to ten days to two weeks, more if we can pull it off. Travel times and weather and last-minute business that had to be done have weighed in on our carefully laid plans from time to time, so we have had to change beaches a time or two over the years. But whenever late October comes around now, we are ready for the beach and the company of just each other.

We still do not do much while we are at the beach—we eat, we read, we take naps, we play cards, we watch the sun set in the evenings, we sit in the water and have long conversations, except for when we sit in the water and do not say anything for hours at a time. We do some other stuff too, but I will not mention those things here. My kids might read this, and the thought of such things with their parents involved is enough to drive them screaming from the room. I have learned over the years how easy it is to empty a room of teenagers at the drop of a hint. They are happy with the concept of their parents being in love; they are not happy with the thought of their parents expressing that love in certain ways.

Because of the kind of work we do, our summers can be too busy for a vacation. Vacation is the term applied to a trip that involves just the two of us. Family trips are not really vacations, except in the strict sense that we have vacated one set of premises and moved the general hullabaloo right along with us.

When we can squeeze in some time for some time away in the summer, we take the children and several of their friends, and sometimes even other folks we know will come and join us. It can be difficult in the summer months for us to get all of the planets aligned so the two of us can go somewhere alone together and actually vacation in the full sense of the word.

So in the way that such things sneak up on you, a particular rhythm has come to our house. About the middle of August or so, we each begin to shape up our schedules and our work loads so the calendar and the to-do list can be abandoned for a couple of weeks in October. Then we start lining up all of the logistical things—airplane tickets and car rentals, somebody to take care of the house and the cats and the mail.

When the children were younger, we used to hire someone to stay at the house, but they are old enough now that we no longer need to do so. They are happy to collect the house-sitter fees anyway. By about two weeks before the day we are to depart, we are reduced to staring out the window, waiting for the signal to go and pack and head for the airport.

All around us the rest of the world thinks summer is long gone; it looks a lot like autumn, in fact. I need a sweater in the morning when it is time to go and get the papers. The big maple trees by our house start to turn color and then lose their leaves. The sounds of the neighborhood travel farther and can be heard more clearly in the cool air, as can the sounds from the train yard a few miles away and the church bells from a few blocks away and the talk and the laughter from the children waiting for the school bus at the corner.

But no matter what the calendar says, it is still summer for us, and it will be summer until we come back from the beach at the end of October.

Our propensity for playing fast and loose with the calendar is something we have come by honestly. “Your life is shaped by the things that you desire,” wrote Thomas Merton. Your calendar ends up being shaped by those things as well. Our life together has its own sense of the passage of time, a rhythm and structure born of the things that we love.

In the first place, we are baseball people at our house, and baseball’s calendar has always been a little skewed. Pitchers and catchers report for “spring” training in February, a month when most of the country is still under wraps and not completely convinced that winter will ever end. If you want spring weather for spring training, you have to go to Florida or Arizona. The first day of summer, according to baseball, is not in June but the beginning of April, when the ballparks open up and the official first pitches are thrown. Baseball summer is not over until the World Series has been played and won and lost in late October. In baseball, there is spring and there is summer; November, December, and January are referred to merely as the off-season.

We are church people at our house as well. And according to the Church, the new year does not begin on January 1; it begins on Advent Sunday, which is exactly four Sundays before Christmas Day and five weeks before the big ball drops in Times Square and Dick Clark announces that New Year’s Day may now be celebrated. The beginning of the rebirth of the world—springtime as it is known by some—is celebrated on January 6 at the beginning of the season of Epiphany. Summer is known as Ordinary Time. Church tradition also maintains that the beginning of the end of the year is marked by All Saints’ Day on November 1. There is an old name for the next few weeks before Advent—Kingdomtide—an old name that many church people do not use anymore. I, for one, think that anything that hastens the end of a season known as Ordinary Time is a good thing.

Because we are people who work in publishing, and because we are people who have had schoolchildren at our house, and because we are also people whose schoolchildren were athletes, we have long had some annual calendar adjustments made for us. When other people were making arrangements for their summer holidays, we were making arrangements to attend the rounds of the book shows we needed to attend. When some folks snuck out of town for spring break, we stuck around town because the high-school softball player in our house had preseason practice every day. When others went off for a Thanksgiving getaway or a winter vacation, we went off to wrestling tournaments with the state-tournament-caliber wrestler who lived upstairs. Some folks celebrate Valentine’s by going out to dinner; we spent some years celebrating Valentine’s Day by watching wrestlers at the state tournament in Chattanooga.

Not only is our calendar a little skewed, we do not even operate on what others would call a normal workday schedule either. In the first place, we both work at home, and our workday does not begin with a traffic report. My commute is about thirty-five steps to my studio in the back garden. Sara does not even leave the house; her office is in the little parlor at the end of the hall.

I try to be in my studio before first light and finish my writer’s workday before noon. Sara starts her workday a little later and slower; she reads the New York Times before she heads down the hall to her desk. The closing bell can ring pretty early around here, and I am not above having a swim in the middle of the afternoon either, usually right after my nap. We are very observant of all holidays which one can possibly take off from work, and we are not above taking days off on Scottish bank holidays either, if for no other reason than we have a list of international holidays in our Filofax and we can get away with it. One of the advantages of being self-employed is having a relationship with our “employer” that allows for such things.

It should come as no surprise that people who live their lives under the influence of the holy institutions of baseball and the Church and who either never go to work or never leave it, depending upon your point of view, would make up their own calendar as they go along.

At our house, the winding down of baseball, the sudden need for a sweater, the approach of Kingdomtide, and the arrival of our wedding anniversary all mingle together to remind us of the need for a good long pause to mark the end of the stretch of time known as summer.

I realize that most folks think summer ends on the day school starts or on Labor Day or thereabouts. I am willing to forgive them. If they are willing to forgive me for the fact that while they are up at five one morning wondering if this will be the first morning they have to scrape the frost off their windows, I am up at five on the same morning headed to the airport with my flipflops on.

It is always dark when we head for the islands.

The taxi pulls up in front of our house around half past five in the morning. We are, astonishingly, both standing at the door, waiting for it to come around the corner.

I am almost always up and about at that time of day. Sara, on the other hand, is not a morning person. She claims she was blissfully unaware there were two five o’clocks in each day until she met me. Leaving for St. Cecilia is, by and large, the only thing for which she is willing to arise before the sun has made an appearance.

We are always taken aback by how many people are at the airport before six in the morning. We stand in the long lines and wonder at the number of people ahead of us. Some of them are like us, heading to some lovely place; they are the ones with the Christmas-morning grins on their faces. Others, though, look as though they are still worn out from yesterday’s plane flights and cab rides and tight schedules and long meetings. And there are folks who look to be carrying some weight, some bad news that has to be borne alone for a few more hours before they can share it with others. I always find myself watching those people in particular and hoping their day will end with their being consoled and comforted by people who love them as much as the people at home love me.

When we reach the head of the line, we struggle for a while with the newfangled touchscreens you have to work with to get your boarding passes. Invariably it occurs to me that if I bought the ticket, the least an airline could do is to push the right buttons on my behalf and hand it to me. I am becoming convinced that there is a nefarious touchscreen conspiracy afoot. I suspect the people who make video games have managed to hoodwink the banking and the airline industries into helping turn the rest of us into video-game addicts. I do not plan to go down without a fight, so I push the wrong buttons and look lost until someone comes out from behind the counter and does it for me. Being lost around technological wizardry is one of my gifts, and looking helpless is one of my regular poses.

Then I hand our bags through while softly reciting The Collect for the Safe and Accurate Arrival of Luggage to myself. It is not yet an official corporate prayer of the Episcopal Church, at least as far as I can tell from reading my copy of The Book of Common Prayer, but I am hopeful it will be someday. Every time I hand my luggage to the folks who put it into the huge microwave thing they use now to look at what I have packed for my trip, I wonder if I will see it again and whether or not whoever gets it will be kind enough to send my notebooks back to me. They can have my clothes as long as they return my paragraphs. Shirts are cheap, relatively speaking; sentences can cost more than most folks would think.

Then we go to the security line and undress to some extent—jacket and shoes and belt and watch-band and hat. Like everyone else in line, we sneak a look at the contents of other people’s carry-on items as we go along. Then down the concourse for coffee and a roll and a sandwich to put in our bag since we have no way of knowing if we are going to eat again before the day is done. Finally they call our numbers, and we are in the plane and in our seats. They push back from the gate, and we are off in the direction of the place where the sun has come blazing up out of the sea.

We head east first and then change into another plane to head south, out over the Atlantic, until we stop at San Juan or Miami to catch another plane to the islands. Then we wait for a while in the last large airport we will see. The next airports—sometimes we stop at one or two before we are there—all look like the ones from movies made in the 1940s: metal buildings and gangways with steps to climb to get into the plane and ground crews pulling luggage carts by hand. Some of the planes used in those movies may still be in use in this part of the world. At least the propellers appear to have been recycled.

We keep flying south, and the gaps between land masses gets larger and larger, and the water below gets bluer and bluer, and the beginning of the end of our summer gets closer and closer.

It is not always dark when we get to the islands, but it was the first time we arrived. Between the rain and the fatigue and the hunger, we were not exactly thrilled that Ricky was not there holding up a sign with our name on it the way we had been told he would be.

Not that anyone would have needed a sign to find us, of course. We were only two of about ten people in the whole place as it turned out. And we were the only two people in the airport who could have been described as people of not much color at all.

There were a couple of folks asleep on their backpacks; how long they had been there was hard to say. I worried that they were waiting for Ricky too and had been doing so for some time. There were two uniformed airline employees behind the counter. And a policeman and an immigration official with a desk full of rubber stamps and yellow cards. There were five or six taxi drivers sitting on the curb, laughing and telling stories. They were easy to spot, because the airport was a big open-air shed sort of affair. But there was no Ricky.

The emotional stakes are high for a tenth-anniversary trip to a romantic island in the West Indies, and I was beginning to feel some pressure. Here I was, incurable romantic and hopeful lover and shy bumbler and sometimes less-than-thorough trip planner, hoping against hope for an idyllic and magical and golden journey. What I seemed to have gotten us into was a tiny airport in a foreign country smaller than the town we live in, and we were standing in the rain in the dead of night. I had very little confidence in my ability to do the things it would take to get us on to where we were supposed to be next. And we were cold and hungry and tired, and I was ready to weep.

“Do you need a taxi?” one of the men said to me.

I know that is what he said, because he had to say it four times before he got it slow enough for me to understand it. I am from the South; I have trouble understanding people from West Chicago, much less the West Indies. “I am looking for Ricky,” I said lamely. I am looking for a miracle was what I was thinking.

“Ricky is not here. He left. But I can take you.”

I was not sure this was a good idea, but having no ideas of my own and not wanting to end up like the two folks sleeping on their luggage, I told him where we were headed. It was something he seemed to already know. Before long, he had rescued our luggage from customs and loaded it into the back of his van, and we were off. We were tearing down a two-lane road in the dark, driving far too fast on what seemed to me to be the wrong side of the road to boot. He was giving us a guided tour, though we could not understand him. And he was talking on his cell phone and honking and waving to other cars and taxis that went by and listening to the radio—all at the same time. Into his hands I had committed my anniversary.

Ten minutes and seventeen nervous glances later, we had been delivered to a dock where we stood in the drizzle and the dark and waited for the boat to take us across the lagoon to the place where we were to stay. I looked hopefully for lights across the way in the mist, and I watched nervously for the boat, and I thought, in general, that if we did not stop traveling soon, I might collapse.

The chugging of a diesel engine announced to us that the boat had arrived. It turns out they kept some of the boats left over from those black-and-white movies too. It was an old wooden boat, low slung, with a window-wrapped cabin in the center of it. A man stood in the bow with a powerful flashlight, and a man steered the boat by turning a big wooden wheel. Stepping onto the boat was like stepping onto The African Queen. I remember thinking we might see Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart if we paid attention. The romantic in me had clearly begun to recover somewhat.

We chugged along through the mist, and we began to see the lights along the hillside where cottages were spread out through the trees. And then the beach came into view and a dock. As we got closer, we could see that a little parade was forming.

The first person in the line was a tall, striking-looking young woman in a long linen dress, holding a very proper and very large umbrella. Next came two men in pressed khakis and floral-patterned shirts. They, too, held umbrellas, one over their heads to keep the rain off and another, still furled, at their sides. Then there was a man with a luggage cart, attended by a man holding an umbrella over both of them and their cart.

As the boat eased into the dock, the woman introduced herself as the manager of the resort and began to say welcoming things to us. The two spare umbrellas were unfurled with a flourish and handed to us as we started along the path from the dock.

We strolled along in the front of this little parade, listening to the manager explain things to us, like what times the meals were served and that someone would ring a bell to remind us when the dining area was open. She told us that we could get a two-page faxed summary of the New York Times by coming to the office each morning and that a steel band would play on Friday.

Every twenty or thirty yards or so, a bright and happy person said, “Good evening,” as we passed.

“Would you like to have dinner?” the manager asked.

“We are just really tired, I think.”

“They will not be dining,” she whispered to a young woman as we passed by a table that had been laid for us just in case. I realized that they had held a place for us for dinner and someone to cook it and serve it, though we had arrived too late for the dinner hour.

“We will have a little something sent to your cottage, then,” she said.

We walked through the trees to the end of the path in the corner of the property. Right by the beach was a cottage, two rooms and a bath, with a swimming pool of our own and a view back across the lagoon on one side and a view out to the sea on the other. The magical visit to paradise for which we had hoped suddenly seemed to be within our grasp.

There were a few moments of instructions and information from the manager, and then she said good night and went out the door. A moment or two later we heard a knock at the door, and I went to open it, and the little something came in, both trays of it. And then we were alone, and we began to giggle.

It has been a number of years now since the evening we rode through the rain in The African Queen. We have found another place to stay, a place that suits us even better than the first place we visited. But we keep coming back to this part of the world, at least in part because on a given night, in the rain, at the end of a long journey, we were made to feel welcome and treated as though someone not only knew we were coming; they were looking forward to it.

My inner cynic, with whom I am in touch far more often than I care to admit, is quick to remind me that such treatment is what I should expect in such a setting. It is quick to point out that I paid good money for all of this and that the least I should expect is to be treated nicely. The inner cynic in you is nodding in agreement. And our inner cynics are right, of course. They always are, are they not?

But another, maybe a better, part of me is coming to understand another thing.

We live in a world where such welcome and gentleness and civility are increasingly rare. Most of the conversation between strangers is terse and quick, and too many times it is cold and rude. It can even be that way, more often than we care to admit, among people who are not strangers. Such is the world we live in that we are almost stunned by hospitality and gentility whenever it breaks out around us. We are drawn to the people and to the places where we find such welcome in abundance.

The memory of that little parade on the dock is not the only reason we now head this way whenever it is October. It is our anniversary, and we are going to go somewhere, and summer will not end until we do. And when we get to where we are going, there will be sunshine and the sea and solitude, because that is what we like the best.

We come this way to celebrate the beginning of our life together and to mark the end of the summer together, because when we are waiting by our front door in the dark in the morning, waiting for the taxi ride to begin our day’s travel, we know that before the day is through, we will not only be welcome, we will have been welcomed.

We will be at home.

Two

There is a virtue in slowness which we have lost.

—GRAHAM GREENE

Sometimes we are able to arrange our flights so we fly directly to St. Cecilia. Other times we have to fly into St. Catherine, a sister island, and wait awhile to catch a plane. I discovered that a boat would take us across to St. Cecilia for about the same amount of money and in about the same amount of time. Instead of waiting on a flight, we get to spend our time riding in a van and then in a boat. After eight or ten hours of travel, it is better to drive through the streets of St. Catherine with Daisy and to cruise across the straits with Captain Christmas (honestly, that is his name) than it is to sit in the airport.

Daisy is the taxi driver who meets us now whenever we fly into St. Catherine. The first time we rode with Daisy, she took us the long way through town before she took us to the harbor. Since St. Catherine was not our final destination and we had a boat to catch, I was ready to get where I was going and stop wrestling luggage and lie down.

She was driving very fast and talking the whole time and telling us what we were seeing on the right and on the left, giving us a guided tour of an island that was merely a way station on our way to where we were really going. Then suddenly she stopped in a crowded street and got out. At first I wondered who was more disconcerted, I or the dozen or so cars lined up behind her on the one-way, one-lane street. It turned out I was the only one who seemed to notice she had stopped and was blocking traffic. Or rather, I should say, the others probably noticed, but it did not bother them.

“I have to check on my daughter,” she said as she stuck her head back in the window for a moment to turn up the radio. Then she strolled across the street and disappeared into an ice-cream parlor.

So we listened to the radio.

The radio stations in this part of the world broadcast everything from music to political discussion to hurricane warnings to sermons to sports updates. The music is anything you might hear in America, plus England and Trinidad and Jamaica. In a twenty-minute set you can go from Buddy Holly to the Allman Brothers to Bob Marley to Celine Dion to Gerry and the Pacemakers to local calypso artists. Interspersed with Mother’s Day tributes and announcements of the day’s school-lunch menus in season, of course.

It is big-time small-town radio at its best. Exactly the sort of radio you want to listen to when you are blocking traffic in a one-lane city street during rush hour. Exactly the sort of radio you are looking for when you are in a hurry.

When Daisy returned with her daughter Peaches in tow, she explained to us that her son was to walk down to the ice-cream store to meet his sister after school and walk her home. But something had happened to change the plan, and so Daisy had to swing by to pick up Peaches. I think the truth is that Peaches and her mother like riding around together.

We only missed six green lights while she was gone. And it turned out that Daisy had to make only two more stops between the ice-cream store and the harbor where we, the paying customers, were to meet our boat. I had this odd notion about time being of the essence for the customer in a taxi who had a boat to catch at a prearranged time. It began to be clear to me that Daisy was operating with a very different sense of time than I was.

We were a half hour late to the harbor, but Captain Christmas was still there, and it seemed as though he had not noticed our tardiness, nor was he even surprised by it.

I think I have entered a different time zone, I said to myself.

When our first water-taxi ride across the straits began, dusk had begun to settle on the islands. We pulled out of the St. Catherine harbor and started out into the straits to head for St. Cecilia. When we reached cruising speed and the bow of the boat raised up high, Sara and I could look back over a stretch of the sea and see the lights of St. Catherine that began to shine over the water.

We were headed west and south out of the harbor and into the sea. After a few minutes, there was nothing at all to the west except water. On the right there was the headland of the southernmost tip of St. Catherine. By the time we passed the headlands, the sun was gone, gone to spend the night with the other side of the world.

Eventually we got out around the headland and then turned south and then east to hook our way into the bay at Bluewater Beach on St. Cecilia. There was this moment when we could no longer see the lights of St. Catherine, and the angle of the boat made it impossible to see the lights of St. Cecilia.

I had thought the whole trip would just take a few minutes, as it is only two and a half miles or so. But it took almost an hour because of the strength of the current in the straits. The Atlantic has been running hard and unimpeded by land since Africa, and it pours through the gaps between these small islands with a considerable amount of speed. We were crossing the straits at a perpendicular angle, and the current fought us the whole way. We were trying to get to St. Cecilia, and the sea was pushing us toward the coast of Mexico as hard as it could.

Finally we could see it: Bluewater Bay and the lights that line its shore. We could just make out the shape of the hill that ran up and away from the beach and the lights from the bungalows scattered up the hillside. The hill is called Windbreak, and under one of those lights was Seastone, the bungalow that was to be home to us for a time. The rest of St. Cecilia was hidden in the dark. In an hour our world had been reduced to one boat, one beach, one hill, and a string of lights scattered along it.

In that hour it was as though one world went away and another world came into view. And time changed at the same time. We went from Central Standard Time to Eastern Standard Time to Atlantic Standard Time while we were on the airplanes all day. But by the time we got to St. Cecilia, somewhere between the ride through the streets with Daisy and the ride on the water with Captain Christmas, we had gone to island time.

Water taxi is a relative term, I think. Most of them are actually deep-sea fishing boats. I have not been on one to go fishing, of course, but I know a fishing boat when I see one.

I gave up fishing when I was eleven. After my grandfather took my brother and me out one day, I discovered that if, in fact, you catch a fish—which can take nearly all day—then you have to grab the thing to take it off the hook. That was when I discovered fish have scales and teeth, and they bleed some, too, while being removed from the hook. They stare at you the whole time you are trying to take the thing out of their mouth that was used to trick them into being your supper. I have heard rumors that before you cook them and eat them, they have to be cleaned as well, and the cleaning involves more than soap and water.

If I had realized that I was someday going to visit this part of the world, I might have attempted to overcome my squeamishness and continued fishing. They say that people who love to fish really love to fish here. People fish for the big five in these waters—tuna, wahoo, marlin, dolphin, and sailfish. Which to a fisherman is evidently akin to climbing all the big peaks of the world or playing all the major golf courses in Scotland or going to the World Series or something.

People also say that if you like deep-sea diving, this is a good place too. It is only about ninety feet down to the thermal vents, where water comes up out of the ocean floor at one hundred degrees or so. Which explains why the water is so warm, though it does not explain why anyone would want to go down ninety feet into the ocean to check on it.

You can also windsurf here, and you can snorkel, and you can sail. You can also just stay on the porch with your binoculars and watch all of these things take place while being glad that you are not grabbing a fish by its gills or being eyeballed by one down near a hole in the ocean floor leading to a thermal vent that connects to the center of the earth.

You can just sit still here. You are on island time.

Other than the pace of the English language, which is used at breakneck speed here, and Tombow, a water-taxi driver who gave us a ride once when we could not get hold of Captain Christmas, one does not encounter hurry very often on St. Cecilia.

Tombow is trying to set a speed record for crossing the straits, I think. I do not know if our last trip across with him was a personal best or not, but I do know I was bounced out of my seat about every twenty yards for two miles. I was more than a little afraid that my luggage or myself or both were about to visit the thermal vents. I suspect Tombow spends a lot of evenings telling stories to his friends about how much fun he had that day bouncing gringos, or whatever the calypso word for gringos is.

Sometimes early in the morning I will hear a boat speeding across the straits toward St. Catherine and beyond to the fishing grounds. I always look to see if it is Tombow or one of the other small boats that make up the fishing fleet on the island.

Tombow may well have been a fisherman before who has decided it is more lucrative and more fun to terrify tourists instead. And perhaps to fish for them when they fall out of his boat.

It could be the heat, of course, that slows everyone and everything down. That is one of the prevailing theories about the fact that life in the southern United States, where Sara and I live, is slower than life in New York City or in Chicago. Centuries of moving slowly to avoid wilting in the humidity of a Mississippi June or an Alabama July or a Tennessee August may have affected our collective genetic makeup in some deep way. It could have happened here too, as warm as it is.

There are three seasons here. The two long ones—high season and low season—are named for the times when there are many visitors and when there are not as many. The third one is hurricane season, named for the time when the storms come howling across the Atlantic from the east. The storms operate on their own calendar, of course, which makes us feel right at home.

Generally speaking, though, there is only one sort of weather here—warm and sunny with occasional interruptions of rain. There is a saying in St. Cecilia that the weather is ideal for cricket 340 days a year; the other 25 days are reserved for rainstorms.

Just as there is only one sort of weather, there is only one pace. It is a pace that is perfectly suited to life on the island. Island time is the proper pace for life in such a climate.

On island time, most things go slow. You hardly ever see anyone racing around. The only racing around on St. Cecilia, as near as I can tell, is connected to sports.

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 holding 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 round 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.

The trade winds blow across the island and manage to leave a set of clouds on the volcano in the center of the island that rarely dissipate. So it is not unusual to be awakened from your nap by the sound of the rain on the roof or by a mist blowing in on your toes. I was reminded once, when I was something less than happy about the sunning round being rained out, that these are the tropics, after all. Fortunately, unless you have failed to adjust the shutters and therefore are in danger of being drenched, the appropriate response to rain on the roof during the napping round is to go back to sleep until it is time for the sunset round.

The sunset round begins in the mid-to-late afternoon. The length of it is predetermined by the length of the day’s sunning round and the plans we have made for dinner.

The sunset round begins with the two of us standing in the pool and reading a book. A lot of people have never considered doing such a thing, much less attempted it. But we seemed to have mastered it.

You need a book, of course, and you need a hat, and you need sunglasses. Something cool to drink is always a good idea as well.

Next you find a spot in the pool where the ledge around the pool is at exactly the right height for you to rest your elbows comfortably and still stand as deep in the cool water as you can be. If, instead of reading, you are going to work a crossword in the big New York Times crossword book you cleverly brought especially for the trip, then you have to be closer to the shallow end so you have enough leverage to move a pencil.

Either way, you need one towel to spread on the tiles along the edge of the pool so you will not scratch your elbows. You need a second towel so you have a place to dry your hands and arms and face, because you will need to put your book down between chapters and sink into the cool water. If the sun is very hot, it may be required between paragraphs. Conversation is allowed during the dipping moments. You cannot read very fast this way, but then, if you are in a hurry, you have come to the wrong island or certainly the wrong bungalow anyway.

Sometimes the sunset round begins as much as two hours before the sunset actually happens, occasionally less. The time passes with reading and paddling around and talking about what you have read. Or about what you want to read next.

You keep an eye out over the railing around the pool deck, checking the western sky from time to time so you can be ready to move when the sun starts down. You have to be sure that you leave enough time to get out and dry off and take up your place in one of the chairs. When the time comes for the sun to make its daily plunge into the sea, you do not want to miss it.

Miami is twelve hundred miles away straight over the straits to the north, and London is four thousand miles away if you turn your head a little bit to the right. Look left off the corner of the pool deck, and Mexico City is out there somewhere behind the spot where the sun is about to disappear.

Take your binoculars in hand, and you can see the last ferry heading into the harbor before darkness overtakes it. You can see a water taxi make its last daredevil sprint across the straits before the darkness closes it down for the evening. The last of the day’s six incoming flights drones overhead, and you can see the lights of a cruise ship now along the horizon and gloat a little bit because you know this island is too small for the ship to stop here. The sugarbirds are hurrying to their nests, and the seabirds make their long, last fishing flights for the day. The mourning doves begin to coo and call, looking for each other, and the tree frogs begin to strike up their chorus.

The sky begins to streak red and pink and then orange and blue and gray. The breeze freshens just a bit as the air cools, and you pull on a shirt and wrap a towel around your legs. When there is nothing left of the sun save a white line on the horizon—no red streaks in the sky, no long golden fingers coming across the sea in your direction—the sunset round is over.

For dinner we sometimes go down the hill and down the road to one of the restaurants. Sometimes we cook at the cottage.

Either way, these are dinners where you take your time between courses and you linger over coffee. For when dinner is over, unless you have to drive back to the cottage or wash the dishes, there is not much to do. It is glorious. No telephone, no television, no early appointments to get ready for. Not much more than cards and quiet talk, books and gentle laughter, and the stars and the moon. You can even go to bed at sundown if you like; there is nothing to keep you from it.

The surf crashes below on the rocks, the breeze comes through the windows, and the ceiling fan creaks. There is the occasional cheerful honk of a car horn on the road below, and sometimes the laughter and the music will filter up the hill from the hotel restaurant down at the beach. The tree frogs sing their peaceful two-note lullaby, the evening hymn of St. Cecilia. And then sweet sleep comes.

When the time comes for you to buy a beach, I recommend you pick one facing directly north or directly south so that the sunrise and the sunset are on your right or your left as you look up and down the beach. Then in the morning you can get up to watch the day begin and to scribble and to have your coffee—all of which you will be required to do if you have been blessed enough to buy a beach. You can watch the day end as well while the breeze freshens and the fishing boats hurry home and the last rays of the sun warm your skin. And you can watch the seabirds as they slowly fly their way along the shoreline toward the sun.

They are fishing. I do not know the science that goes with this—whether they are drawn to the light or the warmth, or if the breezes are more helpful for them to cruise along slowly in the air when the sun is close to the horizon, or if the angle of the sunlight enables them to better see the shape of a snack that is swimming below. I only know that when you are up at first light and you watch the sun as it rises, you will see them flying along the shoreline, heading toward the sun.

And I know that in the evening you will see them headed the other way. Slowly, languidly, occasionally dropping straight down out of the sky from as much as a hundred feet, face first into the water. It looks as though someone has thrown them from a cliff.

And sometimes in the evening, if you can bear to take your eyes off the sunset itself, you will see them circle higher and higher, drifting on the currents of the wind in great circles that spiral upward toward the clouds and toward the sun itself.

We watched one put on a show for us one afternoon at the sunset hour on St. Cecilia. He started out circling the water along the bottom of the cliff, a few feet above the waters of the straits. And then he began making circles and going higher and higher.

He kept arcing his way back so he was almost over us on each turn. I think he knew he had an audience. After a few minutes we had to break out our binoculars and lie flat on our backs and stare straight up to see him. As the sun disappeared, he did as well, far above us; we lost him in a cloud or the shadow of one. He was circling toward the sun when we saw him last.

So am I these days.

One way or another I have spent most of my life watching for certain signs and wonders of the Something Unnamed that is at the center of everything.

Over the years I have come to see that some sitting still is required if one is to see such things. I think that is why I am drawn to the still, blue, almost eternal hour before cockcrow. And it is why I wait at the railing to watch the sun slip away.

I have also come to believe that it helps to keep circling as well, which is as good a name for my scribbling as anything else I can think of. So I do, circling round and round, from scribbling round to sunset round, day after day, season after season, year after year.

I do not know the name of what it is that I will finally come to see. Home may be as good a name as any.

Four

Invent your world.

Surround yourself with people,

color, sounds, and work

that nourish you.

—SARK

Once we arrive on St. Cecilia, we have only two appointments to keep. The second one, we try not to think about. It is the appointment with the boat that will take us off the island and start us on our journey toward the north and the cold, toward the gray and the brown. Toward the off-season, we baseball people would say.

The first appointment is the one we look forward to—it is with Victor, the car-hire man. We are not actually hiring Victor; we are hiring a car from him. Which is the same thing as renting a car from him, only if we do not say “car hire,” no one knows what we are talking about here. We do not really hire a car either. We hire one of those small Japanese Jeep things with four-wheel drive and a good bit of space for piling groceries in the back and a convertible top that folds down into the boot. It has windows that zip out and invariably do not zip back all the way into place until after we turn in the car at the end of our stay. Zipping the windows back in properly is not one of my gifts, nor is it a skill I have yet acquired.

The appointment with Victor is important, because we need the Jeep for going to the market a few times while we are here. And we need it so that we can go to dinner on the days that we decide to tear ourselves away from Seastone. Though, to be sure, we could call a taxi in either case, and someone would be glad to pick us up and drive us around. By my unscientific survey, there are three taxis per tourist on St. Cecilia.

The real reason that we set the appointment with Victor is that, unless we do, we cannot go riding around.

Sara is from a small town in Mississippi. She claims that most of the Sunday afternoons when she was growing up were spent in the backseat of a car wandering through the back roads of the Delta. Sunday mornings were for church, and Sunday evenings too. Sunday afternoons were for driving through the countryside, through the farms and villages and fields that her parents had been raised in and on and around.

After lunch on Sunday, her father would say to her mother, “What would you like to do this afternoon?”

“Let’s just go ridin’ around,” would be the reply. And they would fill the backseat with kids, and off they would go.

I never got to ride around with LeRoy, but I did get to go with Mozelle one afternoon before she passed away. She was right; it was a fine way to spend an afternoon.

We think riding around is a fine way to spend an afternoon on St. Cecilia as well. So we make an appointment with Victor for the first morning we are there.

Victor is not always on time for our appointment. That is not quite true, now that I think of it. Victor operates on island time, which generally means that whenever Victor shows up is the actual time that had been set, no matter what time had actually been set.

He pulls up about fifteen minutes after I have called to see if he is on the way. It is a telephone call I hate to make because it reveals that I am not yet living on island time and that my stateside impatience is still with me. “Still twitching like a live wire,” is the way James Taylor once referred to it in a song about a trip he made down this way once.

When I do finally succumb and make the call, someone assures me that Victor has just left. Which likely means that the person who answered the call will now go and find Victor and tell him that we called. Which is his signal to go and figure out which car he will rent to us and see if it is running today and then drive across the island to where we are.

He honks cheerfully as he drives up the hill and then comes breezing in and lays out his papers and keys on the table. I have always felt it would be bad form to mention that he might be tardy. I have always secretly wondered if it might affect my discount. The price is always discounted when we show that we are prepared to pay in cash, in advance, and in U.S. currency. It is the size of the discount that is in question.

We fill out the forms for the temporary driving license. We get a map and a business card with all the telephone numbers that we may need to get hold of Victor when the car breaks down. We make a plan about where and when we will leave the car and where we will hide the key when it is time for us to go home. The car is always parked at the dock, and the key is always in the ashtray.

“Won’t somebody steal it?” I asked him once.

“This is a small island. Where are they going to take it?” he replied. “Besides, everyone on the island knows these are my cars. Someone will call me and tell me they have seen my car in someone else’s driveway. Then when I need it again, I will go and pick it up.”

Then we chat for a few minutes as though we are old friends. He asks me about the things that we will do while we are here, and everything I mention brings a recommendation to patronize a business owned by one of his family or close friends. I have a hunch that his discounts at those establishments are affected by how many visitors he sends their way.

Then there is another cheerful honk in the driveway, announcing that Victor’s ride is here, and he is off. Our first appointment is concluded, and we pretend the second one—the one where the boat starts us off toward the winter—will never come.

At least once during each week on St. Cecilia we will forgo the sunning round and go riding around. We put the top back on the Jeep and mop up the water that came in when I could not get all of the snaps done up before the daily rain. It takes less energy to bail out the Jeep than it does to figure out all of the snaps and zippers that hold the roof on. What we cannot bail out, the sun and the wind take care of.

Sometimes we have a destination in mind; other times we do not. We grab some binoculars and the camera and the map, and off we go. We wander our way down the hill and along the little lane that leads to the main road. And then we make a choice—right or left.

St. Cecilia is not a very large island. It is only thirty-six square miles altogether, and a fair portion of that is rain-forest-covered mountainside that falls down around a volcano in the center of the island. The crater of the volcano is about thirty-two hundred feet above sea level. Rugged spines of hills—the shoulders of the volcano, so to speak—run down toward the sea and eventually spread out into flatlands.

There is only one main road, and it circles the island, pretty much hugging the shoreline from north to south, the leeward side of the island, and then running along the edge of the mountain back from south to north along the windward side.

The majority of the people and the shops and the restaurants are spread out along the western coast, protected from the winds by the volcano and its surrounding hills. Along this leeward side of the island, the breeze is gentle, and the Caribbean glistens peacefully in the sun. It is also the side of the island where the road is smooth and well paved.

The eastern side of the island has a wild and desolate feeling. The wind blows hard and straight; the windward beaches are lined with rocks and not sand; the reefs cause the surf to crash wildly into the shore. The road has been neglected over here. There are potholes and bumps, and the speed-limit signs, which are ignored on the other side of the island, are unnecessary here.

The map of St. Cecilia is as much fun to look at for what you cannot find as it is for what you can find.

There are no shopping malls and no movie theaters. There are no water parks and no stoplights. There are no four-lane highways and no big discount stores. There are no restaurant chains and no casinos and no city-block-sized duty-free shops.

On the other hand, according to the symbols on the map, there are two places to get ice cream, two places to shoot pool, three ATMs, and an egg farm.

At the stop sign at the beginning of the journey, we most often choose to turn right and head south down the leeward side, hugging the shoreline, headed toward Princetown, remembering our way around the island.

In only a couple of minutes or so, we pass by the Galley Door and then Cassandra’s Café and Domingo’s Beach Bar and Miss Lil’s Famous Cuisine. There are forty restaurants on the island, and we are eating our way through them. It is research that must be done, and we believe that we are up to the task.

We skirt the shoreline for a while, rolling past houses that sit by the bay, and then take the sharp curve that leads to the hill that leads up to St. Peter’s Anglican Church. It is where we go to church when we are here. Like the other four big Anglican churches on the island, it is a great stone structure that has been here for hundreds of years. Each of them sits at the center of one of the parishes that make up the island, and each one is an official hurricane shelter. And each one takes your breath away when you see it.

Soon we pass the entrance to Three Palms, the one large Western resort on the island. It has large villas and a few thousand transplanted palm trees and enough restaurants and lounges and satellite televisions and day spas and tennis courts and tee times to ensure that the people who stay there never have to visit St. Cecilia. They come from the airport in specially marked vans and disappear into the gates long before they get to Princetown. It has all the comforts of the suburbs with better weather. It is a cruise ship with bigger staterooms and a golf course. It is like visiting another island, maybe another country, but it is not like visiting St. Cecilia. It is also the reason there is virtually no unemployment on St. Cecilia.

A little straight stretch of road through the palm trees that hide the bay from view and suddenly we are in Princetown, the capital city. It is an old city and a small city, with narrow streets and low buildings. It bustles with life. For the most part it looks more like a village in the English countryside than a village in the English countryside.

We go through the town and through the roundabout on the other side and start up the hill toward the highlands. We are headed east now, and we are up in the hills on the southern part of the volcano. This is old plantation-inn territory here. There are a dozen or so of them, lovely vacation spots hidden in the rain forest and built in and on and among the ruins of once-great sugar plantations. We are too far up in the hills now and too deep into the trees to see the water anymore.

The last stretch of good road drops down the long hill into St. Andrew’s Parish, and at Midway the road changes, and so does the island. We are on the windward side now, and when we look to the right, we can very often see the Atlantic stretched out. Sometimes the view is so breathtaking that we stop the car just to look.

There are little villages and hamlets spread along the main roads here. They have schools and small businesses; they have little chapels, and they have snackettes. You can go into Bruno’s or Culturama or the Mango Tree. All of them will serve you fried chicken or rice and peas or a curry that makes you grin every time you think of it.

We work our way along the road that runs along this eastern edge of the island, looking down across what were once cane fields and farms and plantations. We make the turn toward the west at the road that goes down to the shore at Three Kings Bay. Then through the little village at the top of the island and past the airport and back to the good road that will take us back to Windbreak. The land flattens out again, and the shoreline is no longer pounded by surf, and the breeze returns to gentle.

On our first visit, the first time we went riding around, we were just taking in the sights. Actually Sara was taking in the sights; I was learning to drive again, or so it seemed. Driving on the wrong side of the road while sitting on the wrong side of the car brings a whole new meaning to the term “driving defensively.” And driving defensively is something you learn to take to heart on St. Cecilia.

Thanks to the English, you are driving in the left-hand lane and not the right-hand lane. So you have to be sure that your instincts as to which way to look and which way to turn do not suddenly kick in and put you in jeopardy. Every time we stop for gasoline, just before we pull back onto the road, the attendant will call out, “Stay to the left. Stay to the left.”

You also have to keep your eye out for a car that has randomly stopped in the middle of the road while the driver carries on a conversation with someone sitting on the porch of the house across the street. There are no shoulders to the road; the drivers just stop in the middle. I finally learned that you do not have to wait for the conversation to wind down—you just honk cheerfully and go around them, no matter how much traffic is coming the other way—but it can still be a little disconcerting and very hard on your sightseeing. You can pretty easily ooh and aah your way right into the oncoming traffic or a ditch if you are not careful.

Besides cars, there are two other kinds of traffic that require constant vigilance. The first is made up of the buses and the taxis. Both of them look like passenger vans—a yellow license plate means that what is about to hit you is a taxi; a green plate indicates it is a bus. Both taxis and buses have brightly colored paint jobs for the most part, and they have names painted on them, like Destiny’s Child and Killer Bee and Go Down Moses. They race up and down the main road and the back roads with the reckless abandon of a seventeen-year-old who has just gotten his license and has been sent to run an errand in his father’s car. Which seems a little out of place for a crowd of folks who are functioning on island time, though I guess you have to make up time somewhere.

The other traffic to keep your eyes open for is the herds of goats and sheep that wander the island. I read somewhere that there are 2.5 ruminants for each St. Cecilian—ruminants being a fancy word for a class of animal that includes sheep and goats. I did not meet the people who did the census, but I am assuming that they know.

People tag their sheep and goats and put bells on them and then turn them loose to wander the island. Who knows how they find them again. Perhaps there is such a thing as a homing goat. Perhaps they do the same thing that we do, just start out along the main road and keep going until the circle of the road brings them home again. We did meet one old St. Cecilian who claims that he gets his goats to come home at night by giving them treats, but he may have been pulling my leg.

The goats and sheep work their way up and down the island, grazing along the roadways, chasing their young ones out of the traffic, and occasionally stopping to nap in the sun or have a group meeting in the lane in which you are driving. I am thinking of recommending that our neighborhood association explore using goats and sheep as traffic-calming devices in our neighborhood back in Tennessee. It works well enough on St. Cecilia that there is not even a single stoplight.

According to the official rules of riding around, one does not stay on the main roads. Riding the blue highways is what you do when you really want to explore a stretch of countryside, whether you are in the plains of the Delta or the hills of Tennessee. So by our second or third trip to St. Cecilia—armed with maps and history books and other information—we were riding up and down every little lane and track that led off the main road and back into the hills in the general direction of the top of the volcano at the center of the island. We started out just trying to look at a pretty house on a ridge that we could see from our balcony. We have driven up or down nearly every little lane on the island now.

Driving one of those lanes entails going pretty much straight up, with an occasional switchback. It involves keeping a sharp eye out for cars coming down the hill toward the sea as well, for most of the roads are only one lane wide, and you have to keep looking ahead for a place to pull off to the side of the road if necessary and to keep remembering how far back to the last wide spot it was in case you have to back up to make room. Going slow helps, which is not hard to do since boulders and stones get washed down into the lanes during the rains.

We are little-hidden-neighborhood sort of people at our house. Some folks like to live in subdivisions with big lawns and brand-new streets and trees that came from a nursery. We are drawn to little blocks of sidewalks and old cottages, the ones with the old trees that have been there for decades and the front porches that people sit on in the evenings. To find such places on St. Cecilia, we have to drive the little lanes.

The first few hundred yards or so going up, generally speaking, we find newer houses in developments of five to ten houses or so. Built of cinder block and stucco, they are homes for middle-class St. Cecilians. They have verandas and galleries to catch the breezes and landscaped yards surrounded by fences to keep their ruminants in and someone else’s ruminants out. The houses are brightly colored for the most part—pinks and yellows and blues and greens—colors that look perfectly natural here but would make us drive off the road if someone painted his house that color in our neighborhood back in the States.

In the last few hundred yards, where we come to the top of a ridge and run out of road and begin to hope for some reasonable place to turn around, we stumble on the retirement and vacation homes for wealthy Westerners. The lawns are large and manicured, there are swimming pools hidden by walls draped in bougainvillea, and the palm trees that line the driveways have lights in them that come on automatically when it is dark.

In the middle is the St. Cecilia to which we are drawn. In the middle we are often winding our way through land that was once home to sugar plantations. There are remnants of sugar mills and waterwheels and storage barns and stone fences. There are little hamlets and villages of just a few houses. The hamlets have names like Chicken Stone and Hard Times and Stony Hill and Middle Works, all testifying to the history of the island and to the difficulty of making a home of it over the years. Sometimes there is a chapel or a little store that serves as the center of village life.

These simple hamlets and their simple houses, surrounded by the remains of the great plantations, make up a St. Cecilia that fires my imagination. If I stop for a moment and get out of the car and sit on a stone and feel the breeze and listen to the birds and stare out at the sea, I can feel myself being transported to another time.

I know this because it happened to us the last time we went riding around. A road we were on was being worked on, so there was a detour to connect us to another road to take us back down the hill toward the main road. We were oohing and aahing our way through some old cane fields at the time and oohed and aahed our way right into a dead end.

It was at the point of a ridge, high up the side of the volcano. It was not the highest point on the island; you have to go up to the top of the volcano for that, something that requires hiking around instead of riding around. Hiking around is not one of our gifts.

So we took our lives in our hands, the very hands that were white-knuckling the steering wheel, and turned the car around. And once we had done it, the view took our breath away.

One does not often get to stand somewhere and see the edge of the whole world. But it seemed as though we did that day.

The hills lay before us, gently rolling their way down to the slivers of beach that lined the shore. The lush green of the trees and the vines and the grasses that cover the landscape were dotted with the bright colors of the houses along the hillsides. There were the deep greens and the blues of the sea itself, dotted by the white sails and gleaming hulls of the boats out in the straits, and the dark greens and grays of the other islands far away. The little town of Princetown could be seen in the distance and the ferries tied up along the pier. There were the clusters of brightly colored fishing boats scattered across the coves and the ribbon of the road that encircles the island.

There were dark patches in the sea where the reefs hover below the surface and the shadows of the clouds being pushed along in and out of the sun’s rays. The sun sparkled over it all as far as the eye could see and then beyond that, the light of it finally dying off into the faint white line of the horizon, marking the edge of this world that is new to us.

“Look at our world,” proclaimed Sara, looking at the view.

It is not our world just yet, of course. And perhaps it may never be. There have not been many moments in my life in which I ever imagined the life that I am living now, and so I am cautious about predicting what may or may not happen to me next. The best things in my life have all been a surprise to me, and I have learned just to be still and be ready.

But these little islands have long been someone else’s world.

As I sat on that ridge, my mind began to wonder its way through the history of the island. In my mind’s eye I could begin to see the Indians who came across those waters that lay out below us to the west, arriving here from South and Central America some two thousand years ago. I could see the sails of the fleets of the Spanish and the French and the British and the Dutch as they slipped through the straits and out of the Atlantic, seeking the shelter that the lee of these small islands could provide, seeking fresh water and fortune and power.

The old town down in the bay and the stone-wall remains of forts and plantations and mills called to mind the tragic trade in sugar and slaves that fueled the European economies for hundreds of years. Those waters below were home to pirates and smugglers, colonizers and explorers, traders and merchants. They were witness to galleons full of gold and ships full of slaves. I thought about the stories I had read as a boy, stories of Christopher Columbus and Horatio Nelson and the rest, and realized I was looking down over the waters that once made up their world.

I have been a beach person all my life. I have stood on a lot of beaches in my time.

When you stand on the shoreline back home, be it the Atlantic beaches of Florida where my parents used to take me when I was young, or along the Pacific where I went to school for a while, or along the Carolina shores where Sara and I celebrated our wedding, or the Gulf Coast where we took the children for vacations for years, the land always seems larger than the sea. It is not true, of course, but no matter how vast the sea looks stretched out in front of you, you know that behind you is this huge expanse of country that goes on for thousands of miles. In an odd sort of way, the sea seems small in comparison.

But it is not so on St. Cecilia. Here, from certain spots, like the ridge where we were sitting that day, one can see what amounts to the edges of the entire world. Which, on the one hand, made me instantly remember how small a part of the world I actually am—whether I am sitting on the ridge looking down over the edges of a small island in the Caribbean or standing on the Outer Banks or sitting on the stoop of my studio back in Tennessee.

It occurred to me that if I lived here, if St. Cecilia were my home, then I could stand here and see all of it. I could see its edges; my whole world would be in sight.

For some reason that I cannot yet name, the thought brought me some measure of comfort. It made me feel less like a tourist and more like a native. Less like someone who was visiting and more and more like someone who belonged, someone who was at home.

On the other hand, it reminded me that within the boundaries that are set by the limits of my vision, there is, or at least can be, a whole world in which to learn to live a life that is as interesting and astonishing as is the whole wide world itself.

I do not yet understand all of what that means to me. I am beginning to believe, however, that somewhere in between those two notions is where I am to make myself at home. That, too, when I sit still and think about it, can take my breath away.

The first time we went riding around on St. Cecilia, we circled the island on the ring road in a couple of hours, including a stop for lunch, and were home for the napping round. The drive is not much more than twenty miles altogether. It takes us longer each time we go now; sometimes it takes two or three riding-around days per visit.

We have to see how they are coming along with the restoration of the old hotel up by the hot springs just above town, and we have to make sure that no one is sneaking a big new resort onto the windward side of the island yet. There have been rumors that someone is planning to build condos out at Three Kings Bay, and so we ride out there each time to make sure we get to see it the way it should be before someone comes along and “improves” it. They are adding to the school near the church in the parish where we stay most often, and we want to see how the work is going.

We have begun to feel the need to keep an eye on things here.

Five

The life of sensation is the life of greed;

it requires more and more.

The life of the spirit requires less and less;

time is ample and its passage sweet.

—ANNIE DILLARD

There is a rule at our house that goes something like this: you gotta have your stuff.

As I recall, the first time it was articulated was when I was trying to explain hauling a stereo system in the trunk of the car to the first place Sara and I went on vacation. Which only seemed over the top to those who were watching me pack, I suppose, because I was trying to fit it in around and underneath the beach chairs I was packing as well. You never know when you are going to get somewhere at the beach and find the beach chairs are uncomfortable.

The whole business would not have been so difficult had we not also been taking a couple of boxes of groceries. You can never be sure the grocery store in the place where you are will have the correct breakfast cereal. Sometimes there are vast differences between the national chain supermarkets in Tennessee and the ones in the next state, though once I am inside, they all look the same to me.

We also were packing a box with incense and candles and compact discs and a pretty tablecloth or two. I put my painting stuff in, too. I like to paint watercolors while I am at the beach, mostly just so I can throw them away when I get home from the beach. Painting is not one of my gifts. And I think there was a boccie ball set in there as well.

Then there were the boxes of books. Sara averages a book a day when she is on vacation. If something wakes her up early, and we do not have to go to town for any reason, she can knock out two of them by bedtime. She was in the red-bird group in grade school in her Weekly Reader days, an achievement she still recalls with great pride.

I had a pile of books too, though I do not read as many books on vacation as she does. I think the highest level that I achieved was maybe blue bird with a bullet or some such thing. I travel with a lot of books, not because I am going to read them all, but because I am not sure what type of reading I will want to do when I get there. I like to be prepared for everything from the ancient mystics to Robert Parker’s Spenser novels to Graham Greene.

Over the years we have stopped hauling most everything but the books when we go on vacation, although I still carry some home stuff. It is my mother’s fault.

My mother is a self-proclaimed nester.

Whenever the family would travel as I was growing up, she would always pack some bits and pieces of home into everyone’s luggage. We had enough siblings at our house that a trip involved three hotel rooms, if not more, and my mother’s first hour or so upon arriving would find her working her way from room to room, putting away clothes and sorting out stuff and setting up the bits and pieces so it would feel like home while we were away from home.

She would put a candle or two in each of the rooms, and then she would add a favorite photograph or two as well. If you were in one of the kids’ rooms, then you would have a photograph of our folks. The favorite one was a photo from their wedding. If you went into Mom and Dad’s room, there was a photo of me playing basketball and one of my brother with his guitar and one of my sister with one of the series of star-crossed cats that wandered into our family and did not live for very long. And a photo of my two little brothers who were so much younger than I that I still think of them as having grown up in a different family.

A favorite blanket was thrown in for napping and then a book or two and a game. There was always a puzzle, purchased for the trip, a group puzzle that we would all work on a bit here and there. She would bring vases, and one of us would be sent off down the halls to look for flowers. We usually scarfed them from the lobby when the bellmen were not looking. Then she would put them around on the Formica-topped desks and bathroom countertops. We always had fresh flowers at home, from my mother’s gardens, and Mother thought if you had some fresh flowers in your room, then you would feel like you were still sleeping in the great house we all called the homeplace. More than once I have helped her to rearrange the furniture in some Holiday Inn so it was more homey in some way.

I grew up thinking this was the way you were supposed to travel. I still think she is right, especially if you are going away on business. The people who have hired you to be away with them, speaking or retreating or conferencing with them for a few days or weeks, cannot always be trusted to remember you really do not want to be away from home in the first place. One of my friends who travels and speaks a great deal more than I do says people think they pay her to speak. “I would listen to myself talk for free,” she says. “What they are really paying me for is to be away from home.”

Home is where you find it, people say. My mother taught me that, if you have to, sometimes you can find it in your suitcase.

We are book people, Sara and I. Between us, we have been writing them and selling them and editing them and reading them and representing them for most of our adult lives. We have been collecting them too.

It would be embarrassing for me to say how many books we own. I am not sure I can tell you how many books we own. I can tell you that based on my rough measurements—measuring the shelves in our house and in my studio and the boxes we have in storage—that if you were to line them up side by side the way that you do on a bookshelf, we have about two hundred yards of books. If Barry Bonds stood at one end and tried to hit a ball to the other end, he could hit two home runs into McCovey Cove before he would get to the end of our line of books.

We had some shelves built into the walls of our dining room not too long ago, and we filled the shelves from floor to ceiling with books. It is like eating dinner in a library. We brought two dozen boxes of books from storage to fill the shelves. We told ourselves for months we could get rid of a fair amount of them as we went through the boxes. In the end, we only gave away about a half dozen or so. How can you give away old friends you have loved and have not seen in such a long time?

These days, when we go to St. Cecilia, we are down to mostly hauling books. Partly because I cannot afford to hire the small jet it would take to get us and all the other stuff down there. Partly because St. Cecilia has been changing me. I am trying to figure out how to pack and carry what are essentially the nonessential essentials, whatever that means.

I still believe you gotta have your stuff. I just don’t gotta have so much of it as I once thought I did.

Everything about being in St. Cecilia is simpler. The more that it becomes home to us, we find it takes less and less stuff to make it so.

The house has a little bit of a kitchen to cook in. It is small enough that you can reach nearly everything while standing in one place. It has enough dishes and utensils to do the job and yet not enough so you can pass on cleaning up after yourself as you go. If you do not wash out the cups after you use them, there will be nothing clean when you go to have tea. If you do not wash things and dry them and put them away, then there is no room to make a sandwich when you are ready for lunch.

There is a room that is both a living room and a dining room. It is where one of you sits and talks while the other one is cooking in the kitchen. The kitchen will hold the two of you but only if you have your arms around each other. Which happens here in the tropics from time to time, but it tends to delay mealtime.

This one room is where you eat and where you play cards and where you sit late into the evening to read. One of my favorite things about this room is that it will hold so little it only takes about three minutes to pick it all up before bedtime, so it is neat and clean in the morning when we rise. Most all of the stuff we need to feel at home in St. Cecilia will fit on the coffee table.

The bedroom has a bed in it and a pair of nightstands to hold the lamps you need so you can read at night. It has a small closet and some shelves for the clothes you need as long as you did not give in to the urge to bring more than you have shelves for.

If you need more stuff, you would have a hard time finding a place to put it.

You would also have a hard time finding much more stuff on St. Cecilia.

On our first trip to St. Cecilia, we set out one afternoon to do some shopping before it was time to head home. We wanted to take something home to the children and to the people who watched out for our house and our children and our cats while we were gone. Then it occurred to us we might do a bit of Christmas shopping while we were at it.

We like to think of ourselves as discriminating when it comes to buying gifts. Most people think that about themselves, I am sure, but we have a kind of congenital disdain for certain kinds of things that people often buy when they travel—we are not really big on T-shirts with slogans or shot glasses with St. Cecilia written on them. So we set out to look for other things.

Here is the thing we discovered. There is nothing much to buy on St. Cecilia. We went in and out of all sorts of places, and the truth is, we ended up with most of our money still in our wallets.

We have discovered that while you are in St. Cecilia, once you have paid for a place to stay, you spend your money on food and supplies and newspapers. There is not much else to spend it on.

We did make a trip out to Newcastle one day to buy some pottery from Mrs. Jamison. She fires it on the ground, without a kiln. She covers it with palm branches and then covers the palm branches with old corrugated metal roofing to bank the fire and to hold the heat in. We drove right by it the first time; we thought it was just a lady burning trash in her backyard. It turns out she was making art.

There is a pair of art galleries on the island with a fair number of works by local painters and photographers. Photographs and paintings never do justice to the beauty of this place; one has to see it to see it. But we bought some cards and some replicas of old maps one time, just to take back to the States to scatter around the house so that when the weather is cold and the world is brown, we can look at the pictures and remember.

The next time we go, I am going to visit the beekeepers’ farm. The British brought honeybees to the island about three hundred years ago. After three hundred years, there are 147 working colonies of bees on the islands. I have no idea how many bees that means are here now. The word is that the honey from St. Cecilia has an exotic flavor for some reason no one understands, and they win international awards for it. The locals say the exotic flavor comes from the exotic flowers. Evidently what you feed a bee makes a difference. I read about the honey on the plane home the last time, but I mean to have me some as soon as I get back.

But beyond those few things, there is not much to buy.

Now I realize we have an advantage that people who live on the island do not have. For one, we have brought with us a supply of books to read while we are there and do not have to figure out how to buy them on the island. Which works out well since there are not many places to buy books.

I also recognize we do not have to go to work in an office every day and do not have to have a wardrobe that will suit such endeavors. On the days I do my work when I am there, and I have worked during a couple of visits (honest, I did), I can do it in my bathing suit while sitting around the pool. I do not need meeting clothes in St. Cecilia. I hardly need them in the States. I am not much of a meeting guy, really.

But still there is this sense that wherever you go on the island, less is always rather more in some way. I also get the sense that no one seems particularly disturbed by this.

One afternoon when we were riding around on the windward side of the island, we stumbled on to a curious little village, a historic site, showing the way that the St. Cecilian house had developed over the years.

There were maybe a dozen buildings. Some were authentic reproductions; some were original buildings that had been moved to the village and restored. Mr. Adamsgate showed us around.

It was a fascinating thing to start out walking through a small thatched hut and then to work our way through the village into the present time. It is a time-travel trip through the decades and the centuries. We could see how the houses became sturdier and prettier and certainly more livable, but we could also see how they had retained a kind of basic simplicity that washed over us when we walked through them.

The little houses reminded me of a place I go on retreat sometimes, in the mountains south of my home, a place called St. Mary’s. When I have been able to arrange it, I have spent as much as a week there, staying alone in a one-room cottage they call the Hermitage.

It is an old sandstone structure that was originally the sacristy of a chapel that burned to the ground back in the thirties. Only the sacristy survived the fire.

It has a bed and a table and a log-burning stove for heat. It has a tiny kitchen, a kind of galley, with a sink and a refrigerator and a stove. It has a bathroom with a shower. It has everything you need if you do not happen to need too much stuff. When I go on retreat to St. Mary’s, I stay in the Hermitage because it feels like home to me for some reason I can never understand.

That little hermitage is one of the few places I have ever been—of the places not actually my home—that have ever felt that way to me. But I keep finding such places almost everywhere I turn on St. Cecilia.

The cottages at Windbreak are a modified version of the traditional St. Cecilia house.

The St. Cecilia house is small, maybe fifteen by twenty, with high ceilings and windows all around to let the breezes through, taking advantage of the natural ventilation generated by air drafts moving from the Atlantic and over the volcano and through the house. It has louvered shutters on the doors and the windows to keep out the rains and to fight off the hurricanes. It has a sharply sloped roof and a veranda along the front. Many of them have a world of gingerbread on them, or at least that is what Sara calls the bits of latticework and fine fretwork full of whimsy and delight. Decoration board is what St. Cecilians call it.

The house has a kind of just-enough-ness that washes over you when you walk through it. A simplicity I am reminded of when I walk through my house.

The first time I walked through a St. Cecilia house, something deep inside me jumped up and starting saying I wanted to live in such a simple house. And something else inside me started asking, What are you going to do with all your stuff?

I started to ask Mr. Adamsgate what he did with all his stuff, but I decided against it. I had an idea what the answer might be.

I think our stuff grows on us. At least mine does on me.

In my house at home, we have a library table that my father found years ago and began to use as a desk. After he passed away, I ended up using it as a desk for a while myself. Now it is our dining table.

In Sara’s office there is another good-sized dining table that belonged to one of my grandfathers. It is sturdy enough to hold the amount of paper that goes with doing the kind of work Sara does.

We have a kitchen table we picked up somewhere along the way, one of those old-fashioned enamel-topped tables from the forties. We bought it to go with the kitchen after we redid the kitchen so it would look like Sara’s grandmother’s kitchen.

So now the table we used to use in the kitchen is in the back hallway. It is a drop-leaf affair I am unwilling to part with because Sara had it before we were married, and it reminds me of those days when we first began to fall in love. We are still at it, by the way. Because we have the table in the hallway, we pile stuff on it so you can hardly get through the hallway to get outside.

Once you do get outside, there is a long table from the millinery store my great-grandfather owned down on the city square in the town where I grew up. Or at least the base of it came from there. We found it in my grandfather’s basement when he passed away and have been putting a succession of plywood tops on it ever since so we can use it for a buffet table whenever we have parties in the backyard.

Then there are the large wrought-iron table we eat on outside and the small wrought-iron table we have coffee on sometimes. There are also two wooden tables we bought from a favorite store up the street.

In my studio there is a long slab of Formica mounted on two stools that functions as a desk for me and a folding sewing table I use sometimes when I go outside to write, something I seldom do, but I keep the table just in case. I think of it this way: just by chance, if I want to write somewhere besides the place I built so that I would have a place to write, and someone is having coffee and eating lunch and throwing a party on all the other tables when it occurs to me to go outside and write, I will still have a table.

Then there are the two tables in storage and the big oak one my aunt has that she promises will come back to me someday and the big pine table that used to be my desk, the one that made its way to Illinois with my younger brother.

It would seem that there is a corollary to the “you gotta have your stuff” rule: you gotta have a table to go with it.

Once when we were driving along a blue highway through the hills in northern Alabama, we passed a sign in front of an antique store proclaiming they were having a sale on “dead people’s stuff.”

I cannot imagine getting rid of a single one of the tables in my house, let alone the other stuff. China, books, baseball memorabilia, golf clubs that I do not use, and all manner of stuff is simply not up for discussion. That is evident by the fact I keep all of it. In my own defense, I want to say I am loath to part with anything belonging to someone who was my ancestor. Which is why the thought of going to an antique store always gives me the willies, because it means someone has sold off their history.

I also have to say that not only do I not frequent antique stores, I do not go to yard sales much either. If I do, then things come home with me, and I can barely walk through the things I have now. Discretionary income should be spent on things that are necessary, like books and baseball tickets, I say.

I do not have charge accounts with people who make furniture. I have not been in a furniture store more than once or twice in the last ten years.

But I can still barely walk through the house for the tables sometimes. If I could blame it on Sara, I would, but the truth of the matter is, most of the tables are mine. She married into far more tables than she had hoped for, I expect. And of the ones she has, she would be willing to part with some of them, except for the fact that I am so sentimental about them. I could look for someone who will take a few of these off my hands, but I am going to want visitation rights.

Whenever I get back to Tennessee from St. Cecilia, I want to go through my house and get rid of every third thing. Where did all of this stuff come from? I always wonder.

The “just enough” quality to life on St. Cecilia always strikes me and always unsettles me and is even beginning to change me. It makes me uneasy about the way we live most of the time back in the States. And I do not feel as though we live very large at our house even when we are in Tennessee.

Time passes more simply in St. Cecilia, and we are surrounded by less stuff. There are fewer clothes in the closet and on the shelves and in the drawers. There are fewer pots and pans and dishes and such. Lord knows there are fewer tables.

Sometimes when I am on St. Cecilia, I think of all my stuff back in Tennessee and wonder how it is doing and whether or not it misses me.

To be sure, I have not yet tried to celebrate Christmas without the three trees we put up each year, or tried to throw a party without a big buffet table, or attempted a dinner for twelve at a table for four while I am in the islands. I have not yet brought my computer here to write, so I have not yet faced the day-to-day hassle of hooking up the printer since there is no desk to leave it on.

I expect that I could manage living more simply in this St. Cecilian way, but I worry it would not take me long to fill up all the available space with more stuff. Before too long I might have too many tables again and too many books and too many other things. I am worried that the walking contradiction I see when I look in the mirror in the mornings would catch up with me sooner or later.

Jim Bouton, a major-league baseball pitcher—whom I quoted in another book, back when I thought what he said had to do with baseball and not something else—once said, “You spend your life gripping a baseball, and in the end you find out it was the other way around.”

I am afraid sometimes I do not really have my stuff but rather my stuff has me.

“Your heart is where your treasure is,” or so I have heard it said, and I hate to think all my treasure is to be found on my tables and on my shelves.

Six

Enter any house that will welcome you,

share their meal … and there is where

you will find the kingdom.

—JESUS OF NAZARETH

Somewhere between the sunning round and the napping round comes the first major decision of the day. To make major decisions prior to the scribbling round and the feeding of the flock is simply against the rules. To go into the napping round without a clear idea of what the evening meal is going to be like is not acceptable either.

Wherever we are, we plan some portion of our day around what we will be doing for dinner in the evening and where we plan to be when we have it and whom we plan to have it with. One of the rules of our life together is to be sure that we are very thoughtful about all food events for the day. The rule is as applicable on St. Cecilia as it is anywhere else we happen to be.

Food is not such serious business to some folks, but it is to us. It could be that we do not have enough to do. It could be that we would rather do this than things we ought to be doing. Or it could be that we have caught on somewhere that sharing a glass of wine and breaking bread together really matter.

So before we have our nap, we have to review all the possibilities. At our house this is known as the food-event planning meeting.

The meeting—it is not a formal affair, there are only the two of us on the committee, it can be held in the shower or on the porch or by the pool or in the hallway, and notes are rarely taken—begins when one of us says, “What do you want to do for dinner?” If you are too specific with the first question—“Where would you like to go to eat ribs tonight?” for example—you reveal your hand too quickly, and you cut off the sort of give-and-take that is conducive to domestic tranquillity.

Planning a food event involves meticulous attention to three particular areas—menu, location, and personnel. If you are just planning a meal, then what you eat is all that matters. If you are planning a food event, then who and where come into play. (It occurs to me just now that a chart would be helpful, perhaps.) The order in which these things are tackled is determined, not by the person who asks the first question, thereby calling the meeting to order, but by the person who answers the first question.

“I don’t know. What do you want to do?” is not a fair answer and is easily rebuffed by experienced food-event committee people. It is like learning to return a serve in tennis, though some people are better at it than others.

A first answer like “Stay in” indicates that the primary concern is location.

“We haven’t seen so-and-so in a while” leads directly to personnel.

“Something large” means the menu questions come first.

After many years as a standing member of the food-event committee, one learns what to listen for.

Are we going out this evening or are we staying in? is the first question. Did we miss the sunset last night because we were getting ready for dinner and so we might rather stay home? Or is it going to be rainy and we really would rather not be out in the weather this evening? How long has it been since we cooked together, just the two of us, laughing and telling stories and wondering out loud about the things we have been wondering to ourselves while we work around each other in the kitchen? Is there a full moon that makes it a good night to stay home and eat by candlelight beside the pool?

If we are going out, are we feeling social or antisocial? Do we feel like liming this evening? Liming is an island word that means hanging out with your friends, talking about the weather or sports or geopolitics or anything else that comes up. Or do we still want to go out but really want to go to a place where there is not much chance of running into conversation? A place where we can take our books or our cards or our dominoes and be only with each other?

If we are going out tonight, then do we want to go out at lunchtime as well? If we have this kind of food or that kind of food for lunch, will that change our dinner plans?

If we are staying in, what are we cooking and do we have everything we need or do we need to go to the market? Which brings the potential for eating out at lunchtime back into play, of course, since we have to go to town anyway. Which brings location and personnel back up for discussion.

And then, of course, in case we change our minds because the weather changes or we nap for too long, do we have some food in the house that will work for a backup plan?

You will notice that all of the dinner questions keep affecting the lunch plan as well. Which is particularly key on St. Cecilia. If you can get the food-event committee meeting to go your way, then you can get yourself downtown in Princetown around noon. According to minutes of the meeting, if there had been minutes, I would have been seen to be angling for fried chicken at the Heptagon, which is what I would be happy to do every day in St. Cecilia. What I am really angling for, I have come to realize, is a chance to be among the people in this new world of mine. And a chance to see if my place in it has changed at all.

The lunch hour in Princetown is crowded.

The schoolchildren are out for lunch, for one thing. We watch them parade up and down the streets in their uniforms. Each school has different colors, and the uniforms are neatly pressed and clean and shining in the sun. The children move in packs along the sidewalks and in the courtyards of the cafés and snackettes. They laugh and cut up the way children everywhere do. We love to watch them.

The sidewalks fill up with businesspeople and shopkeepers and government workers too. The men are in ties and polished shoes; the women are in skirts and high heels. They stroll elegantly and languidly to lunch and back.

There are the taxi drivers and the dockworkers and the others whose work requires less formal dress. The square is full of taxis and vans, and the sounds are of music from the cafés and of people shouting greetings across the street and into shop doorways. Car horns beep cheerfully, and the policeman at the square blows his whistle to direct the traffic.

St. Cecilia is a melting pot. I expect that is true of the other island nations in this part of the world, but I do not know for sure. Any crowd of people anywhere in St. Cecilia is liable to include people of all sorts of colors and origins. The population is primarily African in origin, but everywhere you go, you will find Europeans, East Indians, Asians, and Latin Americans as well.

Nowhere is the global village more apparent than at the Heptagon.

Essentially a lime bar with a one-room kitchen, the Heptagon is a small open-air restaurant that sits along the harbor in Princetown. Someone hung a wraparound porch along the harbor side and put three or four picnic tables in the front. There are a dozen or so stools at the counter and an open-air poolroom in a separate building a few feet away.

We go there for fried chicken and johnnycakes. They offer other things to eat, but we have not yet gotten past the fried chicken and the johnnycakes.

We order our food, and Jessica goes into the back. We then hear this wham, wham, wham sound made by a cleaver chopping our fried chicken into manageable chunks. We wait a little longer, and then when the food finally comes, we sit and eat and watch a fair portion of the world go by.

I am not really a lime bar kind of person.

Some of that, I like to think, has to do with a kind of innate sense of dignity, which, if you met me, you would discern right away. Okay, maybe it is a dignity I hope to have and I think I have from time to time. It could just be shyness and a lack of solid conversational skills.

The other reason I am not a local-hangout person is that when I was young, I was one of those people who got picked on, and I have made it a habit over the years to stay away from places that look as though the people might be rough in any way.

Also, I like my meals to be served on white tablecloths, and I like my fellow diners to be well dressed, and I like to be in places where people talk in hushed tones even when they are laughing and telling stories.

In my life in the States, there are only two exceptions.

One is the little neighborhood restaurant about eight blocks from our house. It is by no means a hangout sort of place—they make things with truffles sometimes, and they have wine tastings, and the staff is always dressed in black—but we know so many people there that making any appearance requires what is sometimes an overwhelming amount of conversation for a shy person.

The restaurant opened about the same time we moved into the neighborhood, and it has become the place where we meet our friends and neighbors most often. When we have to travel, we find ourselves going there the night before we leave and the night we return. Our world is a small one in some ways, and we have to check on it and make sure everyone is doing okay. We also have to hear someone say they will miss us before we go, and someone say they are glad we are back when we return. Both are guaranteed at the Mirror.

The other exception is Brown’s Diner, a small place about fifteen or twenty blocks away from our house, where I often have lunch. Brown’s has the best baseball talk I have ever heard and the best cheeseburgers on the planet, and if I do not have a certain amount of both each week, my well-being and my metabolism are affected in a negative way.

When I get to Brown’s, Terry says hello to me from behind the counter as I come in. He places my order without my saying anything more than hello in return. I even have a semi-assigned seat at the counter. The four guys on my left sit together every day, and so seat number five, if you count from left to right, is the one I am supposed to sit in. Number six belongs to Harold. Or Kathryn. Whichever one gets there first. Someone will ask me to move if I sit too far to the left or right, and lately they have been moving other folks—tourists is the name for those who come in less frequently than once a week—out of my seat when I come in. Every once in a while, it occurs to me that I could actually be liming, which is kind of astonishing for a person as shy as I am.

It took a lot of trips to Brown’s before I got my assigned seat. But after about four or five trips to the Heptagon, I noticed that the regulars were moving around so Sara and I could have a seat at the counter.

What’s not to love about a place like that?

Sometimes when we are planning the day’s food events, we want island food.

We can wander into a snackette anywhere on the island to find saltfish and johnnycakes, a meal that holds the same place in the local cuisine as fish and chips do in Great Britain and a cheeseburger and fries do in the States. On Fridays there is goat water, a stew served nearly everywhere on the last workday of the week. The Water Department even throws a weekly Friday-evening goat-water party in town, a civilized public service if I ever heard of one. Although, I confess, I am not sure what goat water actually is and have been too shy to ask.

Barbecue pits are going in St. Cecilia almost around the clock—chicken and lamb and spare ribs. Seafood is to be found in plenty, of course, steamed or grilled, fresh off the boat as one would expect. And all manner of curries and salads and, my personal favorite, rice and peas. We know where to go to find these things if we want them.

Lately, though, when we want island food, we just call Mrs. Louvin.

A friend on the island told us about her. What she said was that if we wanted local cuisine without going out, we should just call Mrs. Louvin, and for a reasonable amount of money, she would cook what we wanted and bring it to our house.

So Sara called her one day, and they talked on the telephone for a while, figuring what we were going to have for dinner the next night and what time we were going to have it. When everything was settled, Sara hung up the telephone, and we went back to whatever we were doing.

In an hour or so, there was a knock at the door, and I went to the door, and a woman was there who said her name was Mrs. Louvin. I invited her in and called for Sara, and before I could stop it, conversation broke out all around me.

Mrs. Louvin had stopped by on her way home from work to meet the people she was going to cook for as well as to be sure that we had been properly welcomed into her village. Then she was going home to cook for her family. Tomorrow night she would cook for them and for us.

So she stayed for an hour, and she and Sara talked about all manner of things. The next night she came back with our dinner, all gathered up in the best china and serving things that she had, and she sat for a while and chatted before she left.

Mrs. Louvin made dinner for us twice that week. She also dropped by the day before we were to leave, and she and Sara talked for a while and then said good-bye to each other. They put their arms around each other, and there were tears in their eyes, and there were promises made about when we would all see each other again. Sara called her the next day on our way off the island and had tears in her eyes while she did so.

I suspect there are plenty of places no matter where you are that will deliver food. There are not many places that can deliver a food event.

From time to time on St. Cecilia, we decide we are in need of comfort food. Not that life there is so uncomfortable, of course, but we are southerners, after all, and our love for Italian cuisine and seafood and other interesting things notwithstanding, sometimes we need meat and potatoes. “Roast beast,” as Sara calls it, with potatoes and carrots and gravy. Or a good steak and maybe some french fries and a wedge of lettuce and blue cheese dressing and homemade ice cream for dessert. Somewhere on this island you can probably get good sweet tea, the house wine of the South, but we have not found it yet. (Our research will continue, of course.)

But we have found the place for the comfort meal. We always know it is time for such a meal when, during the food-event meeting, a committee member says, “Let’s go see David tonight.” When we go to see David, we know we are in for comfort food and for comfortable conversation to go with it.

Over the years we have learned that the best place to sit and eat in most restaurants, especially small neighborhood ones, is not at one of their best tables. It is at the counter or the bar or the little table closest to the kitchen door. That is where you find the regulars. If you sit at one of the “good” tables where the “guests” are seated, then the conversation is limited to whoever is at your table. Which can be a good thing, depending on what sort of event you had in mind to go with your food.

If you know where to sit, you are automatically included in every conversation within hearing distance. If you want to be private, you can get a table or stay at home. If you want to make friends, sit where the regulars sit.

Which is how we met David and why we go to see him.

David is in charge of where the regulars sit at the Galley Door on St. Cecilia. His bailiwick is a big open-air, circular bar attached to a house. The house is where the kitchen is, and the porch that connects the two is where the tables are. Over by David is where the regulars are. The whole business is only about twenty yards from the beach, looking over a sheltered cove that faces the sunset. The place has all manner of things nautical hanging from the rafters. It is the authentic version of the décor that a Red Lobster tries to do while being in a strip mall instead of being in the West Indies.

When we go to see David, we talk about mystery novels and sixties rock’n’roll music. We talk about how people live on St. Cecilia, and we get tips on where to find stuff that we are having trouble locating, like fresh lobster to cook at our house or the good coffee that comes from Puerto Rico or fresh coconut for the sunset-round snack tomorrow afternoon.

Sometimes David will introduce us to people who come in. Later he fills us in on who they are and what they do. Which is how we met Andrew, who is the chef at the Galley Door and who also runs the sailboat race that we had watched a few days before from the porch at Seastone.

We will ask David about another restaurant, and he will tell us whether or not the chef is good or bad or on vacation. It is where we found out the reason that Cassandra’s Café has been closed. It is where we found out which two hills to look between to see if the clouds off to the east are the kind that just pass over on the way to Mexico or are the ones that will bring rain in the next hour or so.

It is also where we go when we want someone to say that they are glad we are back. There is more to comfort food than just food.

One of the major food events whenever we are on St. Cecilia in the fall is a really fine dinner to celebrate our anniversary.

The first time, we called for a taxi and arranged for someone to take us way up into the mountain to an old plantation inn for the anniversary food event. We called for a taxi because we did not trust ourselves to find Sugar Rock Plantation up in the mountains in the dark. We knew better than to trust ourselves because we had already tried to find the place in the daylight and had no luck at all. A couple of times we thought we could see it across the way, but we could not pick out the right little lane to get to it. I believe the reason there are not many road signs on St. Cecilia is that the taxi drivers have taken them all down as part of their ongoing marketing strategy.

The anniversary dinner was everything we had hoped for. Starting with hors d’oeuvres served on silver trays in the great room while the soft music played and the fans whirled overhead as we waited for the seven-o’clock seating. The chef himself came out to talk with us about the menu and help us make our choices before it was time for dinner. There was linen and lace and silk and pearls and jackets and ties. There were white tablecloths and fresh flowers and sparkling candlelight and a view down the hill into the bay below. At first we could see the faint light of the setting sun way off on the horizon and then later the moon coming up.

And, of course, we had a table just for two and only two. If you believe that more than two persons are required to turn supper into an event, then you need more than just a remedial course in food-event planning.

The next spring when we were down on St. Cecilia, the children and my mother and my aunt were with us. We got tired of trying to describe St. Cecilia, so we just brought them along. We took my mother and my aunt to Hamilton Plantation to have lunch. It was not our anniversary, of course, but we considered it to be research for our next anniversary. There was some feeling that to try to repeat what had been such a splendid event the previous year might be impossible. As it turned out, we did not like it as well.

So the next fall we went to the Inn at Tower Hill to celebrate our anniversary. It was closer to Seastone and easier to find, so we drove this time, feeling adventurous.

We arrived early and went to sit on the veranda for a few moments before dinner. The veranda had been glassed in, with air conditioning, the first air conditioning we had come across in days. It was a quiet night at the inn, or so it seemed, and so the veranda was quiet too. A man who seemed familiar headed in the direction of the little group of couches where we had collapsed into the comfort of the thick cushions and the suddenly astonishing cool air. Usually you have to go to the ATM kiosk downtown to find air conditioning.

“How are you this evening?” he said. “I am glad to see you again. Welcome back.” Which seemed an odd thing to say since we had never actually been to the Inn at Tower Hill before. We assumed he had confused us with a couple of movie stars.

“How is your mother doing? And your aunt?” he said.

This is a small town that just happens to take up an entire island in the Caribbean. It took a minute for the three of us to put it all together, but it turned out that James had been our waiter at Sugar Rock for our first anniversary dinner. He had been our waiter the day we had lunch with my mother and my aunt at Hamilton Plantation. And now here he was in front of us again, at Tower Hill. I began to wonder if I was under surveillance by the Ministry of Tourism for some reason.

These days when the food-event meeting sends us out to eat in St. Cecilia, we have begun to see people we know.

Linda from the vegetable market waves to us when we are on our way to the Heptagon, and Margaret from Windbreak is often at the Heptagon too. And so is Victor from the car-hire company. Eddie is someone we know from one of the restaurants that we like, and so we go to his restaurant to see him sometimes. We run into Andrew from the Galley when we are in the supermarket. We say hello now to Father Geoffrey from the Roman Catholic church a couple of blocks from the square, because he eats brunch where we do on Sundays.

We see the man from the water department whose name I do not know but who always greets us when we see him at the Heptagon. He is a semipermanent fixture there the way I am at Brown’s. If he is there, he always moves over so that Sara and I can sit next to each other at the counter.

We do not really know these people yet, but we are drawn to them. Sometimes we even get to break bread with them. Sometimes we just break bread beside them, and that seems to be enough. And from time to time, we have begun to feel as though we are among them.

On the day we were to catch the boat to head home for the winter the last time we were here, we ended up sitting in the restaurant at Bluewater Beach. We were waiting for Captain Christmas to pick us up. We decided we had better eat something, since one never knows these days how many hours the airlines will keep you in the air without feeding you.

One of our friends, our first friend on the island, in fact, came around the corner and plopped down beside us. We had not seen her this time; a series of telephone messages back and forth had failed to produce a rendezvous somehow, and only moments before we had been wondering if she would be hurt with us because we had not seen her.

“I found you,” she said. “I talked to David, because I knew you would go there on your last night here, and he told me that you had used Deb’s cell phone to arrange for a boat. So I called Deb, and she told me that Captain Christmas was picking you up. So I called Captain Christmas, and he told me that he was picking you up at the Bluewater at noon, and so I closed up my office and ran down the hill to say good-bye. We will miss you while you are gone,” she said.

Sometimes a meal is just that—a meal. The point being to eat and take on fuel for the next few hours of the day. I know how to do that: fried bologna sandwiches are the midday fuel of choice when I am at the beach, any beach.

Sometimes a meal is pasta and good bread under the stars on the deck, with a book beside the plate and the one who loves you across the table with her book and her suntan and her smile. It is a meal that needs no conversation. But it is still an event.

Sometimes it is white tablecloths and silver trays, and sometimes it is down the street a few blocks to our local, where we catch up on the news and make conversation with people who may yet come to recognize our faces. Then maybe they’ll come to grin when they see us coming and move over to make room for us and bring us our favorite thing on the menu without our having to ask.

Sometimes a meal is only a meal, but it can be something else altogether. The difference between a meal and a food event is always a personnel question. If you know how to conduct the meeting, you can start out looking for food and end up finding friends.

Seven

A search for daily meaning

as well as daily bread …

for astonishment rather than torpor;

for a sort of life rather than

a Monday through Friday

sort of dying.

—STUDS TERKEL

We are newspaper people at our house. A day has not really begun properly until I have traveled the few blocks through our neighborhood to a corner market to pick up the day’s papers. According to our reckoning, it takes more than one newspaper a day to keep up. We refer to it as the information round.

We have to have the New York Times, and we have to have our local daily. We have to pick up USA Today for the baseball coverage. (Our edition of the Times gets put to bed before the late games are finished, and our local paper covers the entire major-league day on a single page.) There is a local tabloid whose news coverage is not good but that I count on to give me good coverage of our hometown minor-league team and the local high schools, so I pick it up most days as well. We have a weekly paper in our town that we read for its irreverence and its restaurant reviews and its arts section. There is a free neighborhood weekly that we pick up solely for its column that features anonymous letters from cranky people who complain about things in general. Humor is where you find it, and you can find it in the Green Hills Shopper.

Our newspaper habit has become so ingrained in us that even when we travel, one of my first moves in the morning is to head out for the papers. No matter how large or small the town is, I go hunting for papers first thing. If I can find a Times, I get bonus points.

The routine is altered a little bit in St. Cecilia—the delicate balance between scribbling round and sunning round and napping round has to be carefully monitored—but it is rare for us to go much more than a day or so without feeling an overwhelming need to have newsprint on our hands. Sometimes I want to know what is going on in the outside world, especially if what is going on in the outside world is the World Series. More and more I want to know what is going on in St. Cecilia.

If you want to know what matters to people, read their newspapers.

On our first trip to St. Cecilia, we were driving on the main road for the first time, going along slowly, and we saw this series of signs.

The first sign said, “Is it the truth?” Nothing else was on the sign—no logo, no Web site, no telephone number to call, no company—just the question. We just looked at each other.

About a half mile down the road, we came upon another one. “Is it beneficial to all concerned?” it read.

In a little while we rounded a curve and saw the third one. “Will it build goodwill and better friendship?”

There are three newspapers on St. Cecilia—a local weekly, a daily from one of the sister islands that covers this island as well, and the daily international edition of the Miami Herald. The Herald is about what you would expect it to be, and it gives you the news from the world from a U.S. point of view.

The other two papers give you international news from a somewhat different perspective, to say the least, and the local news. There are daily soap-opera updates, and there are sermons from local ministers. Martha Stewart’s conviction got a couple of columns for three issues, and for some reason Jerry Rice’s trade from Oakland to Seattle got a half page as well. A nine-year-old girl won the Leewards Essay contest, and she got a full page with two four-color photos on the same day Yasser Arafat was hospitalized and got a two-paragraph sidebar. There were big stories for three or four days running when one of the major airlines announced it was increasing the number of direct flights in and out of the islands.

Reading the papers in St. Cecilia gives this curious combination of international perspective, American celebrity culture as viewed from afar, and small-town life that is both charming and curious. And it is endlessly fascinating if you are a newspaper person.

One day while in the market picking up supplies, I went to pick up the papers, and I stumbled on The Golden Book of St. Cecilia. It has become one of my most treasured possessions.

The Golden Book is published every two years or so here. Or at least it is supposed to be. The new edition, being worked on by people who are on island time, is about eighteen months late right now. It is okay with me; I am still working my way through the two hundred odd pages of the last edition.

It is a book published by the part of the government that is trying to encourage investment from the West. The book has things about history and culture and government and all manner of things, but it is really about helping to develop the economy.

I can tell what kind of book it is, because I used to write corporate communications and advertising for a living. I never wrote a book for a country before, but I have written them for corporations, colleges, and hospitals with larger populations and, in one case, a higher GNP. I have been around such books and the people who write them to know enough to have my salt shaker with me when I read them.

If you know how to read them, the books will tell you the things that really matter. You can discover the things about which the government is really proud. You find those things hidden between the lines about overseas investments and GNP and the information economy and all the rest.

And if you know how to read between the lines in the newspapers—something we newspaper people have spent a lifetime doing—you discover the things the people of the island care about the most.

If you read them together, the papers and the government information book, you begin to see other things as well.

One will tell you that economies in the developing world spend a higher percentage of their GNP on healthcare than do the industrialized nations. Another will tell you that the island is especially proud they added a baby warmer at the hospital last year. One points out they have a branch campus of a West Indian medical school here to train doctors to serve throughout the Caribbean and to provide help for the local health clinic. The other celebrates the donation of a dozen chairs to the same clinic so that people who come in now have a place to sit while they wait for one of the ten doctors who work their way through the islands throughout the year.

The official word is that the island’s leaders believe that music and sports are the two greatest influences on youth, and they are committed to using those two vehicles to be involved with and to help shape the lives of the children of St. Cecilia. The other news is that the government runs summer and Easter camps for children where sports and music are taught. And that the new netball complex on Government Road is up and running.

Officially the government proclaims a responsibility to continue to preserve and to nurture the traditional culture and folklore of the island. Which is how you get the newspaper photos of the annual kite-making workshop and the annual calypso workshop and why both things matter. A major festival is held each year as well, at Christmas and sponsored by the government, which virtually shuts down the island for a week—a week of clowns and masquerades and parades and music.

When you read the official line about the ongoing quality of life for the people of St. Cecilia, there is a great deal of talk about civility and harmony and gentleness and hospitality. And the talk and the reality bear a striking resemblance to each other.

We started to notice it at the first meal we ever ate in St. Cecilia.

The first night we were here, we went to Domingo’s to eat supper.

Domingo’s is off the main road two or three hundred yards, tucked in the trees along the beach. It has a raised plywood dance floor and several thatched-roofed huts with lights in the top that hang down over the picnic tables. The music is good—Western rock’n’roll mostly with some calypso mixed in. At Domingo’s we eat ribs and lobster and grilled chicken and salad. They serve it all on big platters you keep passing back and forth.

Domingo was actually born and raised on a nearby island. He was a caddy at the golf course there and cooked sometimes in the clubhouse grill. When he was twenty, he came across the straits to take a job cooking lunch on the beach for some of the workers who were building the big resort on St. Cecilia. When the resort was finished, the other workers left. Domingo simply moved his grill about fifty yards down the beach and opened a restaurant.

When we arrived at the beach and at our table, Domingo himself—a beautiful man in a white golf shirt and crisp linen shorts and dreadlocks—greeted us and came and sat at our table for a while to say hello and to make us feel welcome.

The time came to pay the bill, and we pulled out our credit cards. The young man who was waiting on our table told us they do not take credit cards at Domingo’s. Who knew?

We did not have enough cash between us to settle the bill and pay for the taxi back to Windbreak. It was clearly too far to walk and too late for me to do so had it been close enough to walk.

“Let me see if I can find Domingo,” I said, not knowing exactly what I was going to say to Domingo when I did find him.

I reintroduced myself to Domingo and explained to him we had had a fine time and had enjoyed the food and the hospitality but we did not have enough cash to pay the bill. I could have it tomorrow when the banks were open, but right now I was out of cash and out of luck.

“Where are you staying?” he asked.

I told him.

“Ah,” he said with a smile, “then you will be back. And you can pay me then.” He shook my hand and asked if we needed for him to arrange a ride.

The next day we went into town to get the money for Domingo and to visit the market for fresh fruits and vegetables to take back to the cottage. After buying a few things from a lady named Linda, we tried to buy a few mangoes from a lady in the next stall.

We found ourselves without enough small change. We were having trouble communicating as well. We might have had enough change and did not know it.

Linda stepped in. When she realized the problem, she handed the lady two coins out of her own pocket. “You can pay it back to me when you are here again sometime,” she said. Which we did, of course.

I know it may sound like it, but I do not kid myself that everything on St. Cecilia is open and aboveboard or that all people are treating all other people with civility at all times.

Some of our friends here on the island had their dogs poisoned in a dispute over whose cows could wander over whose property line. I have received a blank stare or two while in certain stores and shops, the kind of stare reserved for people who are perceived to be intruding on someone else’s turf. There is one clerk at the market who fails to grin back at me every time I am in her line at the counter, no matter how charming I happen to have been that day. I will get her to grin back yet, though.

I think I got hustled pretty good by the car-hire company one time when I was here. And the exchange rate has some flexibility in it, depending on who is behind the counter at the Heptagon and which bank you go to and which taxi driver you call. In Princetown there are already enough boom boxes and large-car stereos in use that I have learned to avoid certain corners at certain times of the day.

“Is this heaven?” asked one of the ballplayers in the film Field of Dreams.

“No, it’s Iowa,” was the reply.

This sweet island in the Caribbean is not heaven either; it is only St. Cecilia. But one does get the sense that the people who live here still believe they are to be about the business of replicating heaven if they can.

I do not claim to know all the politics or all the social and cultural mores in St. Cecilia. I do not understand all those things in my own country, and I have lived there all my life. I only know what I read in the government book and in the papers and what I have learned in a few visits.

What I sense is that people in St. Cecilia still believe their government should get up in the morning and be about the business of trying to make people’s lives better. A belief that seems to be shared by the people in the government. What I sense is that people are expected to live out their lives with something resembling civility and grace.

In St. Cecilia there is an earnestness, an idealism, an authentic sense of concern expressed in the public discourse that is largely missing in the country in which I was born.

Some of the civility here may simply be akin to the kind of civility found in small-town life in our country long ago and may still be found there for all I know. I have been a city boy all my life. Sara says the whole island reminds her of the small town in which she grew up. I have seen her hometown, and it has only about six hundred souls in it. The island has almost ten thousand, not counting those of us who come to visit.

Of course, it seems to me that it is far easier to be civil when the pace is slow and the air is clean and there are no freeways to be stuck on and no malls to work around. And on this island, even with all the people who have moved here over the years, a healthy percentage of the population is either related or grew up with each other. Which does not necessarily lead to civility, but folks here know that they are going to run into everybody again sometime, maybe even a half-dozen times a day.

But it seems to me that something else must be at work here, though I cannot say for certain what it is. It is a place that is filled with small kindnesses and gestures and signs that seem to give evidence of some larger conspiracy, a conspiracy to commit civil society perhaps. Whatever one calls it, I am jealous of it, and I wonder what it would be like to live in the middle of it.

Sometimes I feel as though the people of this island either know something that the rest of us do not or we have forgotten something that they always have remembered. Sometimes, just to remind myself of what they may know and what I am looking for, I take up my corner at the Heptagon and read the newspapers and watch this new world go by.

Eight

Home … carry it in your heart,

safe among your own.

—JAMES TAYLOR

All marriages have ritual sentences, I think. Ours certainly does. They are the sentences that are somewhere between private jokes and gestures of affection.

On the mornings I have to leave home to go on the road to be with a group for a spiritual retreat or a writers’ workshop or some such thing—something I love to do, though I wish all those groups would choose to meet somewhere close enough for me to be able to sleep in my own bed each night—I will say to Sara, “Did they call yet?”

“Not yet,” she will say, “but they will.”

“Oh, good, then I won’t have to go.”

In a minute while I am packing my suitcase, I will say, “Will you listen for the telephone while I am in the shower?”

“Oh, yes,” she will say. “They will call soon.”

We are both pretending we are expecting the telephone call that says the retreat has been canceled for one reason or another. My experience is that Episcopalians will cancel a retreat on short notice if it turns out they cannot get separate rooms from each other and Methodists will call it off if they cannot get coffee before the dining room is open in the morning. I expect some evangelical group to call some morning and say they do not need the retreat after all because the Rapture has come and they are all going on to glory without the rest of us. I do hope they call before I get to the airport. I do not know what happens here after the Rapture, but I am certain I want to be in line next to Sara rather than standing alone in the line at security.

One of the other ritual conversations we now have goes like this: “We have to leave St. Cecilia on Saturday,” Sara will say.

She is only allowed to say this sentence during the last week we are there. Before that, we both have to pretend we will be able to stay forever.

“No, no, no,” I will say. “I called Margaret, and she said no one else is booked into Seastone until at least 2010, and that is a tentative booking, and we can stay as long as we like.”

“Oh good,” she will say as she turns back to her book. “Thanks, honey.”

“You are welcome.”

Such ritual sentences and conversations can slip by you if you are not paying attention. You can have one and not even know it.

Some of them are signals and signs. Some of them are reminders of moments when you discovered that something about your life together had changed or was about to.

I have long believed the way you get places in your life is that you keep moving in a certain direction over a long period of time, and then one day you look up, and you have crossed the line into some new place. You had no idea you were anywhere close to the line in the first place.

That is how Sara and I decided to get married.

We had been together for a while, a good long while, long enough for me to have put in a couple of thousand hours working on the gardens in her backyard. One afternoon we were sitting in the sunshine, watching the goldfinches we had tricked into the yard with the proper feeder and waiting to see the sun drop down below the hills across the way.

“What are you thinking about?” I asked.

Then I added, “Don’t edit.” It was a premarital ritual sentence that meant I really do want to know what you are thinking although it could turn out I would rather not have known. She was quiet for a few moments.

“I am thinking about getting married,” she said.

“So am I,” I said. And then we both went back to watching the sun set and the goldfinches feed and said no more about it.

The next evening we were in the car headed to a restaurant for dinner. I stopped at the light at the big intersection of Old Hickory Boulevard and Lebanon Road. We were not talking much about anything, partly because at least one of us was still thinking about getting married. It was sixteen minutes after six for those of you keeping score at home.

Sara reached over and turned down the radio.

“To you,” she said.

“Oh, good,” I replied. “This is going to work out great.” We turned the radio back up.

Neither of us actually knows who proposed to whom, but we both take credit for it. Which is fine. There has been enough joy in it to go around.

“So how did you get here from London?” we asked David one evening when we were sitting at the Galley Door. It was apparent to us—British accent and slightly-wind-and-sun-smoothed tan notwithstanding—that David has not always lived on St. Cecilia. For some reason we had a sense David was a transplant, an expatriate from England. I was interested in how he stumbled over the line and onto St. Cecilia.

There are clues in words. Sometimes you catch them; sometimes you do not. We are word people, Sara and I, people of the sentence, if you will. And whatever the clues were, we had picked up on them and guessed correctly.

As I was asking the question, I was watching his granddaughter play in the sand by the beach. Earlier his grandson had warned me I should roll up my windows because rain was coming. When I questioned his forecast, he pointed to the notch between the big mountain and the second ridge to the north. “If there are clouds in that notch, then it will rain,” he said. He was right; it did rain. I found myself wishing I had raised my children here, where the sun shines and the water is warm and the world looks as though you are standing on the edge of it.

I was watching his daughter-in-law welcome people to the tables, and I could see his wife and his son through the windows of the kitchen.

“We came out for Christmas one year,” he said. “We just sort of never went back.”

“Never?”

“Well, we had to go back to put the house up for sale, but that was the only time.”

“How long ago was it?” we asked.

“Sixteen years.”

One of the people we have come to know is a man named Tim. The first time we met Tim, he waited on our table at the hotel restaurant at Bluewater Beach. He was formal and attentive, and I remember thinking this was too small a job for the person Tim seemed to be.

The next time we were there, we discovered Tim was the maître d’. And the next time he had changed from a white jacket to a suit, and as he chatted us up while we waited for dinner, he told us he was also the restaurant manager.

On the way home to the States, I was looking at some of the magazines I had picked up in St. Cecilia. There was a feature story on Tim. He is the postman in St. Peter’s Parish, and he hitchhikes into town each morning to pick up the mail, and then he hitches back to deliver the mail before he goes to Bluewater Beach to be a waiter or a host or whatever else is on tap for the evening.

Most everyone we have met on St. Cecilia cobbles together a living. We know this because we have heard it over supper somewhere.

David works at the Galley Door four days a week, and he and his wife also have a gift shop downtown. Randy cooks at Domingo’s, and he cooks at Three Palms too, and he has a house where he does private dinner parties every month or so.

The guy who owns the art gallery is also a painter. He is also an illustrator, which is how he makes a living. He spends a fair portion of the year in the States, hustling illustration business so he can hang on to his studio and his gallery. The woman who watches the gallery for him while he is gone is a housewife whose husband teaches at the medical school. They also housesit for people.

Tim is a postman and a waiter and a maître d’ and a restaurant manager. Andrew has a restaurant and a water-sports business and a catering service and runs the biggest annual fishing tournament on the island.

I met a man at the Heptagon one day who handed me a card that said, “Taxi, tours, real-estate sales, property management, auto rental, and personal services.”

I heard a story about a house painter who was considering branching out into neurosurgery. It was not a bad strategy, I suppose, there not being a neurosurgeon on the island. When it was explained to him how much training and cost was involved, he thoughtfully considered his position for a moment. “I think I will need a manual,” he said.

It is an island of generalists. A crowd of folks with whom I—writer, housekeeper, teacher, retreat leader, and general all-round yardman—feel very comfortable. It is a crowd of people with whom I am very comfortable breaking bread. It is a crowd of people who keeps stumbling over lines into new places.

It may well be a crowd with whom I could be comfortable making a life.

Stumbling over the line is how I became a writer too.

I was raised in a family of publishers and writers and poets and artists of all sorts. The people I knew when I was growing up, the grownups I mean, were my father’s publishing and artistic friends. They would stay at our house, and we would go on vacations together, and I was forever being hauled off to some concert or conference or something and listening to people read their words or sing their songs.

It turned out I had a gift for turning phrases and for the random rearrangement of alphabetical characters that would bring a smile to the faces of strangers from time to time. I knew it when I was thirteen. I spent many years in publishing and then in advertising and then in editing, trying to learn how to be a writer.

One day in the course of ghostwriting a book for the third time in my life, I realized I could write a book of my own. To this day I can tell you where I was and what time of day it was and what I was wearing and which paragraphs I was writing. But I have to say that I had no idea the line was in front of me until I realized I was on the other side of it. I had gone from wanting to be a writer to talking about being a writer to actually being a writer, and I was the last one to notice I had finally crossed over the line.

Most everything good in my life has been a surprise. I am far enough along now to stop trying to figure stuff out and to spend my time trying to be awake enough to see stuff when it happens and attentive enough to hear the clues in the sentences around me.

It could be I stumbled over some sort of line between living in the States and living in St. Cecilia one day in a rainstorm. They have a rain quota in St. Cecilia they are supposed to hit before the dry season comes, and evidently they had some catching up to do that day.

I had managed to get the scribbling round in and was headed upstairs to see if Sara was ready for the sunning round when the clouds came up and the sky started to fall.

We sat on the porch and watched the road down by Bluewater Beach being washed away. We watched as a couple of boats in the bay filled up with so much water we thought they were going to sink. So did the owners, because they came out twice during the height of the storm to bail out the boats. We watched the water back up out of the bay and up toward the hotel at Bluewater Beach. And we watched the mud line move out into the bay as the mud washed down from the hills and the ridges. It went on for eight hours.

At one point we went in to make a sandwich and realized there were three inches of water in our bedroom. I thought the water had been coming in the windows, but it turned out the cistern under the house had been overcome by the rain, and the cool, clean, fresh water was backing up into our bedroom.

We spent the whole day on the porch, up under the veranda, watching the rain and the water and the cars getting stuck. And I realized I never wanted to leave.

Going to St. Cecilia may have started out to be about going to the sun. It is crossing a line about something else, it seems.

David says that often the people who like Windbreak Cove are the sort of people who come back to stay. I hope he is right. And I think I already knew that.

If you stay in a cottage for a few days or a few weeks at Windbreak Cove, then you cannot just stay at Windbreak Cove. There is no restaurant to go to and no coffee in the lobby and no room service. They come and clean your cottage only about every three days, and the office is closed for more hours than it is open. You cannot just hide out at Windbreak and never actually go to St. Cecilia.

When it comes to food and supplies, to neatness and clean clothes, to information and conversation, you are on your own, by and large. You have to live a life there, your own life, and if it does not work from day to day and hour to hour, you cannot call the front desk. Most of the time, no one is there. On the one hand, you are happy for the solitude. On the other hand, you discover that you have to leave your solitude to go and find your place.

It could be I stumbled over the line to St. Cecilia one Sunday morning when I was at St. Peter’s for Mass.

St. Peter’s Anglican Church is the oldest Protestant church in the Leeward Islands. It is one of four Anglican parishes on the island, and they share a priest. The first time we went, we happened to be there on the Sunday of the month he was there as well.

St. Cecilians consider themselves to be a religious people. The government literature declares them to be a “Bible-oriented society.” Religion is an intrinsic part of everyday life. Not, it seems to me, in an obtrusive way, but rather in an elemental way. Among the holidays—paid holidays when the island shuts down and the government closes—are Boxing Day and Whitmonday. How many places can you go where the day after Pentecost is declared a national holiday? Where I come from, even the church folks do not take the day off for Pentecost.

There is a tradition in the churches on St. Cecilia. They have a lot of visitors because of the tourist trade, and if you are a visitor to their service, then they ask you to stand and to say who you are and where you are from. Then they applaud.

Someday I would like not to have to introduce myself at St. Peter’s anymore.

We have a sort of shrine in our house now, on a small green table in a sky blue colored room. It has a small lamp we leave on night and day. The shrine has Sara’s discount card from the supermarket on the island. It has coins and bills with Queen Elizabeth on them. She keeps her St. Cecilia driver’s license there and the statue a friend gave us the last time we were there. There are sketches too, penciled onto the back of watercolor cards—sketches of the way Sara would build a house if we get the chance to build one there.

In addition to our shrine, we also have a running list of schemes to cobble together a living on St. Cecilia.

We can do our regular work there already. Writers and agents can work anywhere there is electricity and a phone line and an airport and a FedEx drop. Sara thinks if we had a small bed-and-breakfast, maybe four rooms besides our own, then we could have guests for two weeks a month and have no guests for the other two.

The last time we were there, we visited the art gallery. There was a card in the window that said it was for sale, and the asking price was not out of reach. If my son were graduating from college this spring instead of graduating from high school, we might well have pulled a David. “We came out for our anniversary and just sort of never went home,” I can hear myself saying.

Sara has also noticed the salt flats on a sister island and thinks salt mining—for cooking salt or for some beauty product—may well be the answer. We have bought a new camera too, and Sara is working on her photography skills, and I am composing romantic greeting cards in my head.

We may well be crossing a line here.

Getting married led us to the shore for our honeymoon. Which led to our going to the beach for our anniversary each October, and that led to an attempt to celebrate our tenth anniversary in a way we would never forget.

That led to a ride across a lagoon in The African Queen and the little parade, and then it led to St. Cecilia. Who can tell exactly what may happen next?

The last time we were there, I was awake early on the first morning, sitting up and about to get out of bed to begin the scribbling round, and Sara sat up in the bed. With wonder in her voice, she said, “Look at where we are.”

So we looked. Past the soft yellow walls of the little bedroom, with the first light slipping in through the windows. Out the window then and over the bougainvillea, deep purple against the white of the balcony and the early blue of the sky, a sky that still held the moon and some of the stars. Through the trees and across the grasses waving in the wind and on to the edge of the cliff. And over the edge to the straits, all green and gray and blue, with a fishing boat off in the distance and ripples of waves and the shore of St. Catherine in the distance, lit up by the sun.

Later, in my head, I started driving the island, down past Bluewater and along the shoreline to Princetown. Up the hill and through the roundabout and back around past Leon’s and into the hills where the plantations are. Past the art gallery road and then around the curve to where the horse track is and the beach where we went body-surfing with the children. Up along the windward coast to Three Kings Bay and then around to Newcastle.

Later in the day I wished I had mustered up the wit to say, “Look at who we are among too.” The people at St. Peter’s and in the market and down at Domingo’s. Margaret and David and Andrew and Kate and Mrs. Gilbert. Deb and Daisy and Linda and Tim and James and Captain Christmas. And the folks who are liming at the Heptagon and shopping at the Trade Winds.

I want these people to be my friends, I thought. And I may be willing to cross a line to make it so.

We were standing in the airport in Miami, headed toward Charlotte and then back to Tennessee. Sara sighed.

“I do not know if I am going home or leaving home,” she said. And then we were both quiet for a long time. It had been our first trip to St. Cecilia, and we were both stunned we could feel that way about a place so quickly and so deeply. We were afraid to say much more.

“Are you going to be there when I get there?” I finally asked in Charlotte. It is a derivative of one of the ritual sentences of our marriage.

She nodded, though more slowly than she often does. There were tears in her eyes as she started to understand what we had just discovered or maybe discovered again. Not only on St. Cecilia but in our hearts.

“Then, either way, it will be home,” I said. “So I am going too.”

Later, as the plane pushed back, one of us said, “With you.”

And we began to giggle.

Author’s Note

I have a confession to make, and I have gratitude that is due, as is the case with all writers almost all the time, whether we always do so or not.

The confession is that St. Cecilia and its people and its places are real, though most of the names in this book are not, including the name St. Cecilia. There are some names that are real, the sort of obvious ones, like the name of the body of water the island sits in and the name of the state I live in. But I have invented names for the real places mentioned and described in these pages. I did so for a reason.

Some of the writers who have written books about faraway places that they loved now say they wish they had never written the books at all. Enough armchair travelers, under the influence of their books, got up out of their chairs and got on a plane to see for themselves the things that make such places so wonderful—simplicity, solitude, beauty, and so on—and these things have disappeared under the weight of it.

St. Cecilia is a small place, and though the Ministry of Tourism there might take exception, I am loath to do anything to create a stampede of tourists. I have never actually created a stampede with any of my books before, but I am taking no chances.

That said, there are some names for people in the book that I want to be sure you know are true. One of them is my name.

The other name is Sara. I do not always put my family’s names in my books. But I cannot write about home without saying the name Sara. I cannot even find home without Sara, and if I could, I would not go there if she was not going to be there.

The gratitude is due to the people of St. Cecilia in general. And in the specific it is due Kathryn, Julie, Derrick, Daisy, Jane, Eulyn, and Debbie.

And to the people at WaterBrook Press—particularly Steve and Shannon and Jessica and Dudley and Ginia and Carol. And to Don, who is traveling in another circle these days but who has not been forgotten.

And, as always, to Ms. Lil of Linda Lane, queen of the red pencil, without whom I cannot make books at all. And to Ms. Dupree of Arab, without whom I do not get a chance to try. And to Miss Jones, without whom these sentences would be less than they are now.

If you do find St. Cecilia, look us up. I will be happy to see you.

The truth is that finding a faraway place that is home to you the way St. Cecilia is becoming home to us is up to you, wherever it may be. Home is always where you find it, anyway. The trick is to keep looking for it and to be wise enough to say yes to it when it finally finds you. Namaste.

R. Benson

Seastone, St. Cecilia, West Indies

Kingdomtide, 2005