Home by Another Way (11 page)

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.