Reading in the little waterfront garden of
the museum of Nevis History, frigate birds cruising overhead and bees
in the flowering pudding pipe tree, I began to understand I wasn't
likely to make it to my beach hammock and rum punch that afternoon as
planned. I was becoming just a bit obsessed, fixed on the notion
that the island of Nevis, where I'd come for a week of Caribbean
relaxing, held some kind of mystery at its heart, somewhere out
there, waiting for me.
I could happily spend the rest of my life at the Hermitage,
where extraordinary meals are served on the veranda or in the 1740
manor house, one of the oldest wooden houses in the Caribbean, in an
orchardlike setting of fruit trees (including avocados, cashews,
breadfruits and calabashes) and a dozen charming cottages.
Everything in Nevis has memory, I
thought---the bees and the stones, the horsemen on the beach, the
masqueraders in whirling ribbons and mirrors and feathers. And after
sunset at Golden Rock I saw, or thought I saw, on the darkening
mountain behind my windmill, the faint glow no one can explain but
which I would say is also a form of memory.