Home by Another Way (6 page)

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.