Abbie

Walking Around Grinning

The conductor slides open the bus door and steps to the road as it rolls to a stop. The bus is basically full, but he folds down the aisle seat behind him. Stella hops into it. I get into the front bench seat where the conductor was sitting. He gets in crouching and facing backwards, basically on my lap. We both look out the windows as the bus zooms forward, swerving around a slow vehicle. This is normal.

The bus driver stops to chat with an oncoming bus driver. They gesture arms out their windows and laugh. Cars honk. As we drive off, I pay the conductor, and he reaches for his zippered purse to give me change.

Stella and I get off at the Food Fair stop. We walk up the steep hill past the roadkill mongoose. Her legs are feeling yesterday’s Kung Fu class, she tells me. I drop her off at her hilltop school, then walk down and turn up a steep road for my new favorite walk home. It takes me up a steep winding hill through the fancy Mon Tout neighborhood. Pretty houses. Gorgeous views.

Then I walk further up—so steep the concrete is cut with horizontal grooves for traction. At the top, I stop in the shade, letting the wind lift my sweaty hair. From here, my view is houses among trees sloping down and down to the turquoise water that wraps the curving coast and stretches to the horizon.

At the intersection, I turn down a dirt road, zig-zag over to a paved road past the golf course, then thread through a tight neighborhood of overlapping houses. Beyond the bar at the top of that road, I pass patches of cabbages and bananas and pigeon peas. A man balances on a steep slope above the road to water his young pineapple plants. White goats and black sheep nibble the brush, tied by a rope around their neck, always in slightly different locations.

Everywhere I go, I watch Grenadians greet each other.

I appreciate how most Grenadians greet me with a simple “Morning,” or “Afternoon.” When I lived in San Jose, Costa Rica, in college, I walked around clenching my jaw. Even dressed like a nun, I had to ignore cat-calls, hissing, and Hey Baby. Grenada was different.

Recently, though, men started engaging me. A lingering greeting. A fist-bump. A handshake. An invite to get my number. They were not deterred by the fact that I sweat profusely and wear a big floppy hat and walk way too fast for casual conversation. One guy came at me with open arms that I dodged and parried with a too-polite, “No thank you.” It was getting annoying and slightly unsettling.

Then I realized: I have been walking around grinning.

I am smiling at the bright bougainvillea, lizards posing on fences, hens and their clutches of chicks. I smile at the bus conductors stopping traffic to help little schoolkids across the street. A guy selling fruit or standing in the gutter, shoveling it out. I even beam at the loose dogs and say, “Are you a good dog doing good dog things?” I’ve been meeting everybody’s eyes and lighting up my face.

It finally occurred to me that grinning everywhere might give the message that I am open to interaction. So I have decided to experiment. I still smile at children and old people. I smile at women, who rarely smile back. Most Grenadian women do not walk around smiling, and it seems to work. So when I see an approaching man—from puberty to middle-age—I fix my face. It’s working.

This morning on my walk, a young man is walking towards me. So I check my body language. I square my shoulders forward. My cheeks drop. I focus on my feet or stare into the distance. I scowl. When he greets me, I do not look at him. I give him a grumpy, toneless, “Morning.” He walks on past me. I smile.

There are so many layers to the culture of a place. I am not privy to the deeper layers of what it means to be Grenadian, but I soak up what I see in the streets. Concrete walls are covered with bright murals. Gates and doors display no-nonsense signs. There are people cleaning out gutters and trimming back weeds.

Down on the busy Kirani James Road—named for Grenada’s accomplished Olympic sprinter—bus drivers shout teasing jabs at each other as they pass. Pedestrians get a ride when a friend stops for them. Two men yell escalating curses at each other, then bust out laughing. Elementary-aged children in pressed uniforms hold the hands of small siblings as they catch the public bus to school. A well-dressed woman loudly chews out a local guy for whatever reason. It’s a small island. People know each other.

I am wrapping up my morning walk by turning down Belmont Road. On this road, there’s a jerk chicken place and a guy who washes cars in the street and a tiny porch bar built on a retaining wall made of tires painted in many colors. I lift my face under my hat and greet a tall girl in pleated navy skirt and cravat as she arrives at her school. “Morning,” she says. She almost smiles.

Who Feels It Knows

From where Sam and I get off the bus, it’s about an hour walk to Hog Island’s second beach. Andrew and I have also walked there from Stella’s school after dropping her off in the morning. We have driven a rental car with Andrew’s sister and family, parked it where the road curves away towards Lance aux Epines, then walked the remaining forty minutes through Mt. Hartman to the beach. Each trip is different.

The first time we walked there, Andrew and I paused frequently for using binoculars and a camera. We passed roaming cattle, attended by cattle egrets. This part of Grenada is arid, with cactus plants and agave and leguminous trees. A tropical mockingbird filled a tree with its everything song. We admired the heavy bills and long tails of two smooth-billed ani’s perched on a power line. We saw little ground doves and eared doves and zenaida doves, but no Grenada doves. The wind was whipping whitecaps into the water, so we skipped swimming. We were in exploration mode. From second beach, we kept going to the beach where Roger’s Bar serves up a big party on Sundays. There was a protected harbor for the boating crowd and a midden of conch shells. Since it was Friday, we were alone with two guys running a small bar. One of them sold us two coconuts, which he opened at the top with a machete and stuck in straws for us to drink the salty-sweet, slightly viscous coconut water. He directed us to a trail through the mangroves as a shortcut back to the bridge.

Two weeks ago with family, we carried snorkel gear and were lucky enough find perfect conditions. There was only a scant breeze, and the water was clear and relatively calm. Underwater, we found a large seagrass bed filling the area in front of the beach. Most of the fish were along the rocks and beyond them, where coral hosted them. Some of us swam back with sea urchin skeletons—plentiful on the shallow sea floor and more delicate than eggshells—cradled in our hands. Behind the beach was a clearing with a partly covered plywood bar and benches and evidence of many small campfires. We sat there to eat our peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and cheese-flavored crunchy snacks.

Last week, Sam and Andrew walked out there, mostly for fishing. They followed a footpath down along the mangroves under the bridge where it meets Hog Island. The water was low enough for them to walk partway across the strait. Sam caught two barracudas, long and pointy-faced. After photos, he released them, careful to avoid their razor teeth.

Now Sam and I are back under that bridge. He re-assembles his fishing rod, which he has broken down for the bus ride. I watch him expertly replace the reel, thread the line up the rod, then tie a particular knot to attach the snap swivel. He chooses a lure and snaps it in place. The water is much higher today, he observes, and wades just around the edge of the mangroves.

While he fishes, I read The White Woman on the Green Bicycle. It’s a novel of Trinidad and belonging and unraveling and complicated love of people and place. I can see and taste so many of the Caribbean details—frigate birds, chadon beni herb, rum, traffic, the dialect, the heat, the rhythm of the place. I can feel the complicated loves. I keep glancing up to see Sam, casting the lure far out and reeling it back in his own rhythm.

When he’s ready to move on, we walk onward towards second beach. I am carrying Andrew’s backpack, heavy with water and a hammock and snorkel gear and books and peanut butter sandwiches, which honestly don’t appeal to either of us today. Sam has the day off school, and this excursion was my idea. It is hot. Even the stiff wind does not cool us. We walk in silence.

Reaching the beach, we see the whitecaps. Even from shore, the water looks turbid, but having dragged Sam out here, I am determined to try snorkeling. I sink into the waves by the rocks and swim out. Not only is the water opaque with sediment, chunks of seagrass and other detritus cling to my arms and face. I turn and swim back across to the beach. Now we are equally thwarted and grumpy. I change into dry clothes that I will rapidly soak with sweat. The walk back to the bus is the antithesis of whatever mother-son bonding I had envisioned.

And then we are pressed against each other in an oven-hot bus, without the usual windows or air conditioning. And then we are back in our little house. And then I am immediately leaving to pick up Stella from school. I walk back along the sidewalk, then down the walkway to Grand Anse Beach, my usual route.

Today though, the water is higher than I have seen it, filling the section of narrow sand I need to cross to get down to where the beach widens. Waves crash on the sea wall and backflip into white spray. I stow my phone in the small dry bag I carry in my backpack and pull off my sandals and wade through the waves. By the time I get to Stella’s school, my outer clothes have partly dried in the warm wind, but I am still a soggy-looking mom who really needs an air-conditioned nap.

Here we are in Grenada. We are trying to live here in some kind of real way, and we are just as human as we are at home. I keep thinking of the decal on the back of one bus, quoting Bob Marley: Who Feels It Knows. I think about how a small island can be all kinds of experiences. I think about the complicated loves.

photo credit Andrew Gascho Landis for both barracuda photos

Some Lingering Impressions

The water is clear today, so I walk to Pandy beach with my prescription snorkel mask, which has turned out to be an excellent investment. At the water’s edge, I wet the mask then spit into it to prevent fogging. I pull the rubber straps over my head. It suctions to my face. My teeth hold the snorkel mouthpiece with jaw muscles slightly sore from yesterday’s snorkeling. I lean into the waves.

Facedown, I become aquatic. The cool water wraps around me. I inhale through the tube, adding buoyancy, and float like a starfish over rocks and coral. Along the coral, the first to greet me are dusky damselfish, small brown roundish fish as abundant as sparrows. Then I might see sergeant majors—another damselfish but light-colored, with five black vertical stripes and a splash of yellow across the back. Also common, but they look like they feel important.

A yellow-tailed parrotfish swims past me, longer and chunkier than the damselfish. Each of its scales is outlined, covering it with a prominent diamond pattern of warm browns. It wriggles into a crack between coral. Down below, I see a Northern ocean surgeon—a wide fish, smoothly pale, edged in blue with a black line curving up the cheek. I hold my breath and dive. A whitish fish with a horizontal yellow stripe hovers low near the sand. It flips two long barbels down from its chin and scrubbles in the sand for tiny invertebrates to eat, which is how I know it’s a yellow goatfish.

I surface, blowing out my snorkel, keeping my face underwater. There goes a small group of French grunts, fine yellow and blue stripes swirling across their sides. There is a bluehead wrasse, thin and decorated in colorblocks of blue, black-and-white, then green. There is a slippery dick wrasse, patterned in green and pink and two horizontal full-length stripes. There is a banded butterflyfish, a showy fish even just in its black-and-white stripes. Each fish rivets me. The rest of the island recedes.

We actually saw a lot of the island over the past week. Andrew’s parents and his sister’s family visited, bringing memories of Grenada with them. His parents lived here in the late 1970’s; it’s where Andrew was born. We rented cars and drove one day up the West coast to where they lived in Gouyave. Another day, we drove up the East coast to Sauteurs, where they returned for a summer when Andrew was nine years old. They held up the lens of their experiences as we explored, and we made new memories at Hog Island, St. George’s, Diamond Chocolate Factory, La Sagesse Beach, Belmont Estate, and Bathway Beach. Each place, a story layered on stories.

Right now, though, there is no other place but these crevices, this many-textured coral. I float here. My arms move gently. It is quiet. The fish go about their business. I do not ever need to surface.

To my delight, I spot a juvenile yellowtail damselfish wiggling close to the coral. Less than two inches, these babies are black covered in iridescent blue dots. It looks like they are lit from within—little Lite-Brite toys—because each spot glows. They are radiant. I watch until it ducks out of sight.

Another favorite swims by just before I turn for shore. From the top, I see a short horn protruding above each big eye. The fish would look stern if not for its pointy-face, smoochy lips. From head-on, this fish is a triangle. It is white, covered in the brown, reticulated pattern that gives it the name honeycomb cowfish. The wide-based body tapers into a skinny tail that fans at the end. It looks like it was designed by a committee. This honeycomb cowfish is just larger than a regulation American football, and a smaller one swims behind it. I follow until they seem to melt away into deeper water.

Then I raise my head. I look for the sea almond tree with a particular branch swooping to the side, and I swim towards it. If I align myself just beyond the tip of that branch, I have a clear path through rocks and coral. I watch underwater until I see the black sand rippling towards the beach, then I plant my feet. The waves push me onto the pebbled sand. Around my cheeks are creases from the snorkel mask. The snorkeling, the fish, the stories, and the people have all left lingering impressions.

Where they make Jouvay chocolate–dark chocolate with optional nutmeg or ginger flavors

Belmont Estate (photo credit Marc Rempel)

The Heat Is A Balm

Content warning: This post contains unabashed gushing about life on a Caribbean Island.

If you are deep in winter and will be triggered by mention of sunshine, warmth, or beaches, please skip this post. Take care of yourself.

…………….

It is about a six-minute walk from our door to the dark, pebbly sand of our favorite beach. This beach might not be everyone’s favorite. The sand is not pristine white. The waves can be rougher, and they break onto rocks and coral. This beach is used mostly by locals, and is often nearly empty. We adore it.

During our first week here, the ocean was calm and clear. Time disappeared while we snorkeled, trying to hold all the fish characteristics in our minds until we could look up their identities. We kept going back each day to check our memories and because there were too many kinds to remember. We compared notes about the wide ones with vertical stripes or the ones with a yellow stripe from mouth to tail or that one I still can’t figure out with dark above and light below and maybe a bluish tail. Since that week, the water has been vigorous and turbid, allowing limited snorkeling.

We love the beach even without snorkeling. We can walk there in the evening after school and stay until the sun sets around 6pm. Stella loves to hunt for shells or build little houses of sand and rocks. Sam and Andrew often take their fishing rods. One evening, Andrew fished up a gorgeous flame box crab. Its claws fit against its body perfectly, so it could fold itself into a box or open up like a transformer, claws blazing, which is how it bloodied Andrew’s finger. He set it on the sand, and the crab immediately burrowed by pushing its claws outward and tucking its body fast into the scooped out spot. I could have watched it for hours, but we returned it to the ocean.

Lining the beach are sea almond trees, shading us with their large dark green leaves. We can hang our hammock between them and spread our beach blanket. We lie there, cool in the wave sounds. With my eyes closed, the waves remind me of a storm—wind and thunder—but with no worry about the roof that leaks or what might blow down. The ocean, when I’m lying on the beach, is the antidote to worry. I want to bottle this feeling and send it to everyone I love. I want to feel it forever.

On and off the beach, I am feeling fully present here and fully lucky to be here. Now my body accepts the heat as a balm. It soothes me. With exertion, I still sweat like a horse, but I cool down fast. My ears accept the roosters crowing and the reggae remixes and the night-whistling frogs and barking dogs and the weed-eaters as background rhythms. Even my nose is growing accustomed to a cornucopia of smells—brush smoke and laundry detergent.

My legs understand the dance with traffic. I no longer flinch constantly as I walk. Honks mean something. The first loud bus honk lets me know it’s coming up behind me, then a short, uplifted question honk, asking if I need a ride. I level my hand and give it a small “no” wave or meet the hustler’s eyes and shake my head just slightly. Most days I am walking.

Each weekday, I walk about a mile to pick up Stella from school. I take off my sandals for the middle third of this walk, along Grand Anse beach. I walk with the waves around my ankles, sometimes splashing my knees. As I dodge cruise-ship tourists in the busiest section, I think, Don’t mind me, I’m just heading to parent pickup. Then I angle away from the water and sit in the shade on a horizontal section of tree trunk. I slap the sand off my feet in my habitual sets of three short slaps, two long brushes. I pull on my sandals.

I cross the busy road, pass the Food Fair, and climb the hill to the Montessori. Standing by the gate, I am the sweaty mom who cannot stop myself from grinning at the little kids, sharing our joy. Soon, Stella fast-walks down through the school yard. She holds my hand on our way back down the hill. Sometimes, she wants to visit the koi pond in the Food Fair courtyard. Then we cross the road to the bus stop. We know how to slide into the farthest-back available bus seats. We let our bodies sway and the loud music wash over us. Stella gives me a glance when it’s time to rap my knuckle on the bus window, signaling to let us off at Grey Stones Road. We will have a snack and homework. Then we might head to the beach.

A Boat Called Feelings

A Grenadian woman walking to work keeps herself together. She seems fully aware of her surroundings, but not distracted by them. Each foot steps with intention; this is not meditative but necessary on the road-edge terrain. She is not walking loosely like I am with my arms swinging and my long strides in my airy skirt and sneakers. This woman does not waste movements; she is keeping everything together.

Her work requires a professional look. Her blouse buttoned up and her skirt snugging her hips. It is a miracle to me, her steadiness in those fine shoes. This woman is not in a rush, but she moves right along. She holds her space on that road. The buses honk but move out of her way.

I am thinking of her on my walk to St. George’s in the intermittent light rain and morning coolness. I have cut through the Eric Gairy Botanical Gardens. Perched in a large pavilion, I watch pedestrians climb the hill to the Ministerial buildings—the Ministry of Education, Immigration Office, Cabinet. When the rain crescendos to a brief downpour, the Grenadians pop up their umbrellas without breaking stride.

The end of January is nearly the dry season, and I wonder if the rains will stop entirely for a few months. I have been loving the way you can hear them building. They cut the heat. They rinse the air. All of the colors seem brighter when the sky clears.

This island is fully saturated in color. If color were audible, it would be full volume with a complex range of notes and chords. A visual concert. Back home at this time of year, the world is gray and brown and white. I crave color, so in winter I dabble with paints or knit with bright yarns. Here, I am content with words on a page to balance the world outside. Here, the world outside is a feast.

As this rain tapers, I scrutinize the large tree near the pavilion. My first impression is pine tree, but I realize its long needles are segmented, reminding me of plants called horsetail (Equisetum). Its little cones are actually knobby balls. At its base, the trunk looks like the tendons in a person’s neck, straining. When I am in a new place, everything is a wonder or a mystery, or both.

I look up the tree and learn that it is not from here. It’s an Australian pine (Casuarina Equisetifolia—I see how it got its species name), which is not really a pine tree nor is it from here. In some places, especially the southern U.S., the Australian pine is considered a weed. It was introduced far beyond its native range because it can stabilize soil, fixes nitrogen, and makes good lumber. This not-pine tree has its own story.

When I am in a new place, my impressions are just the surface. My observations catalog so much of what I see and so little of what is actually there. As a human being, all of my judgements are colored by the things I already assume to be true.

Although I am watching closely, I do not know the Grenadian woman on her way to work. Or if she is actually going to work. Or what all she carries or how she keeps it together enough to walk up the road. She is a wonder and a mystery, just like everyone.