Sometimes I feel like I’m living a childhood fantasy. For one thing, the center of Barbados is covered with sugar, and I love sugar, always have. Not only does sugar cane grow in its fields, the sweetest bananas I’ve ever tasted hang from its trees. It’s like Candy Land, only better.

Which is why on most days I can’t imagine ever leaving.

Today, however, I woke to a grey sky in a week of grey days with Jacqueline a zillion miles away, and I actually yearned for Vermont. It’s getting hard to be so far away from the place where we grew up. Lately I’ve been seeing people who remind me too much of you. For instance, one day Jacqueline and I were standing on the beach in front of Soup Bowl when we heard someone calling joyfully to us from the stone steps above. I looked up and for a wonderful moment thought Matthew had surprised us. Elation! But it was only a light Rasta island boy selling fruit he’d picked locally. Despair!

Then two days ago I was driving along the South Coast and saw Christopher. I had to restrain myself from pulling over. An hour later Nicholas was waiting in front of the movies. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. Would he have minded a fatherly hug? 

So I’m missing everybody too much and feeling like Vermont looks a lot better than it did ten weeks ago. I guess in my way I’m getting ready to come home to Galusha Hill.

This morning with that feeling in tow I decided to run errands. For weeks I’ve wanted to buy a plank for the footbridge I walk across on those days when I go to Cattlewash, the beach just north of us. But the lumber yard would only sell me a 12-footer when I needed just 5. Sometimes the frustration of a grey day knows no bounds.

Then around noon the sky cleared off, and at home the sun was shining, so I headed off to Cattlewash. It was the lowest tide I’d ever seen there, so low that I actually swam in several different places. O the beauty of the waters! It was no rougher in spots than the Jersey coast on a perfectly clear blue, stifling hot, sweet summer’s day. Aahhhh!

There are these giant stone table tops of reef that normally are inaccessible, but today I could walk out on one of them with ease. When I did I discovered a small pool with a sandy bottom and a school of fish flitting about. I dunked down and enjoyed the warm crystal waters. Every time a wave passed over, it created a gentle whirlpool that soothed my body.

On my way back to Bathsheba, I took the hard-packed path that runs through the brush behind the rocky section of the beach. I came upon an old man walking with a stick for a cane. When I say “old man,” I mean really old. The oldest men I’ve ever seen walk the paths and roads of this island—gaunt, proud old men whose faces are chiseled with noble grief.

We started talking about the fruit he’d just picked (he told me the name, but I didn’t catch it). We ambled along, him chatting away in a language I couldn’t quite comprehend, me nodding my head in response to his detailed description about how to prepare the fruit for eating. When we came to the foot bridge that crosses the small gorge, he hesitated while approaching the empty space left by the missing plank. I asked him if he was okay. Of course he was okay, though it was scary watching him slowly maneuver it.

But there’s something I haven’t told you yet: I carried a plank over 5 feet long that I had just found washed up onto Cattlewash beach. A gift from the sea, it was in my hand as we walked over the bridge. Watching him hesitate, I knew I had to get that plank cut and inserted.

Back in Bathsheba I borrowed a saw and hammer and went back to the foot bridge where I filled the gap a bit. It’s not perfect, but it’s better, especially for old men and their stick canes.

Almost every day I meet someone or see something I want to tell you about, but I get caught up in my teaching and never get around to writing it.

Here’s something that happened on Sunday that was special: In the early evening I went for a walk on our beach. There was a young man in his early 20s who was setting up an architectural scale model of a monument he’d designed as part of a competition to commemorate the first free village in Barbados. His design was white walls that didn’t quite touch, one with a doorway and window, all open to the sky. They were like alabaster pillars in a circle around a larger-than-life black hand thrust into the land, with a (cardboard) Bajan woman standing behind. It struck me as very elegant and simple and powerful, and I told him so. It was just he and I admiring his tiny monument as he took photos–a most pleasant interlude on the soft sands of Bathsheba on a quiet Sunday eve. 

So do I still want to come back to Vermont? Yes, but not yet, not today.

After all, life in Candy Land can be very sweet.