To Travel Again

Without being able to travel abroad, my little island life seems to get busier each day. I live in a garden that needs constant tending. Flowers, vines, and weeds all compete for my attention, like city billboards, and the monkeys on the path are like pedestrians on a busy street, we try not to bump into each other but sometimes eye contact is made. With fewer people around on the island, the birds have become more familiar. The banana quits share my sugar at breakfast and the hummingbirds will buzz in my ear if I fail to feed them.

Since I can’t fly, I walk to the corner instead, where the reggae music is played on five-foot-tall speakers. Chicken, barbequed and jerked, slow cooks over coals. Lobster boils in a big pot. The beer chills in five-gallon buckets, each cold bottle a chaser for the hot white rum that comes from the stills in the mountain. I spend the afternoons sitting by the road, in the shade of the mango trees with my neighbors.

Now, after 18 months the travel restrictions have changed, our borders are reopening, and the quarantine requirements are being reduced. We can leave the island again. I could set out at sunrise tomorrow and find myself 1000 miles away. But, the garden has a hold on me, a hundred tendrils of sentiment tie me to Nevis and I’m not going anywhere much farther than the corner.