Home by Another Way (5 page)

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

T
he 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.