“Everything about this is kind of awful…except that it’s just Perfect.” –Elias Cordosa

Greetings Dear Ones!

Most days this time of year, due to its huge, north-facing windows and fourteen-foot ceilings, my shop struggles to reach 55 degrees Fahrenheit (12.8 C), the minimum temperature at which my fingers can work efficiently. I am engaged in a bunch of dreadful projects, one of which involves opening a series of Harris Tweed jacket sleeves and letting forty years’ worth of accumulated grit, dust, dirt, and dandruff fall out on the table. I must vacuum the table after each sleeve before I can continue. I’m pretty sure I will get a version of Black Lung if I don’t. A row of ski jackets waits for new zippers. (They are those horrible, waterproof things that have been heat-bonded, not sewn, into the outer shell.) A mother’s vintage wedding gown is to be cut up (by me, once I gather my nerve) and remade into something her daughter can wear at her wedding reception in June. (The bride’s mother cannot attend because of a medical issue and her father has passed on. The bride will wear her mother's gown, incorporating fabric from her father's clothing to feel close to both on her special day.) My serger is broken. The dog is shivering, even though our sole space heater is aimed directly at him, in his nest under the counter. The phone will not stop ringing—about fifty percent of the calls are robo-calls from telemarketers, the others are people asking, “do you do pants?” (What does this even mean?)

I look around me, at ‘My Dream Job,’ and sigh.

“You asked for this,” says Prudence.

“Yes,” I admit, smiling. “And everything about it is kind of awful, except that it’s Perfect.”

Luckily, I got the Dream Vacation from this Dream Life. Less than ten weeks ago, I was exploring a coral reef, hot, sandy, blistered at a festival of Irish music and absurdity like no other. My son was one of the invited musicians for a festival called “Tunes on Grand Turks” and insisted I go with him. He’s been part of it for a few years now and has always insisted I should go along. Typically, they host this thing in May, right in the midst of Prom season or lambing and garden dramas and it’s easy enough for me to find at least three thousand other reasons not to go, not least of which is that I would prefer to go so many other places first! If I’m going to hang out on an island listening to people with Irish accents playing the music of my heritage, I would rather it be the cool, green actual Erin’s isle. Watching a bunch of pale blue people from Co. Mayo getting fried to a crisp while roaming about in search of red snapper curry makes about as much sense to me as spray tans at a dance feis. Everyone knows the Irish do many things spectacularly—tanning isn’t one of them.

This year, they changed the festival to November. “You MUST come,” he insisted. “You NEVER take a vacation, ever! Please, let me give this to you.”

So I did. In the wake of my father’s death, depleted, depressed, and highly aware of the importance of Good Memories, Quality Time with my son on a tropical island in a mosquito-infested cottage with no air-conditioning seemed like the logical, inevitable choice over “doing pants.” There will always be plenty of pants to do. It’s not every day your 25-year-old son buys you a flight out of his own gig money and whisks you away to paradise.

Our beloved Hermit of Hermit Hollow agreed to manage all the critters at home; I sent all the “Do you do pants?” calls straight to voicemail; I boarded a plane alone in Boston (my son was in Baltimore at a banjo festival) and headed south. I recognized a bunch of his musical buddies at the gate.

“Stick with them,” he said, via cellphone. “They know where to go. I told them all to look after you.”

It’s been a while since I have flown so I listened carefully to the flight attendants telling me there is a flotation device beneath my seat. After what seemed like a week of standing in TSA queues in multiple airports, we arrived at Providenciales, sore in every sinew. Stacking a winter’s worth of hay in the barn loft is nothing to the work-out one gets shifting a small carry-on bag and a fiddle case through three airport terminals in one day. Finally, we had a two-hour layover before taking a hopper flight to our destination, a tiny scribble of green outlined in beige in the middle of a huge puddle of turquoise. I had regretted wearing all the wool and flannel since our stop in North Carolina and felt covered in sea water already. While the boys enthusiastically tucked themselves into plates piled with fried conch from the lounge bar, I passed the time observing people making their way to the restrooms. I decided to be an undercover anthropologist trying to learn all I can about what it means to attend an Irish music festival in the Caribbean.

You can tell a lot about a people’s native music by the way they walk. The tempos are baked in. An airport lounge is a veritable jam session of vibes and virtuosity. Tourists from the norther hemisphere walk in shrill staccatos, pushing the beat and the people around them, with surging forward momentum, as if the destination is the only result worth seeking. The natives are relaxed, with passive, lolling, sideways strolls frequently interrupted by passing Northern soloists who have had too many cups of coffee.

As soon as we reached Grand Turks, his buddies ditched me. I got put in the cab with the luggage, not the people, so I had no idea where to go to check in upon arrival. I eventually found a pub and there, the beleaguered girlfriend of the cottage’s new owner, who was off island and had no idea they were supposed to have any rooms ready. They had been closed for two months for renovations and were still in the process of throwing away all the vintage moldy furniture. She had a basket of keys, none of which were marked with room numbers. We decided against the first room she showed me, as it seemed to be raining internally, through the ceiling, from a blocked shower stall above. She then unlocked a freshly painted room that had been so thickly and thoroughly painted none of the electrical outlets could receive plugs. The room contained two brand new beds and several small piles of drywall scraps and plaster on the floor. She asked the staff to mop the floors and, after a moment, “maybe also the walls.” With dawdling minuteness and utter indifference, they dutifully removed all the dust piles, along with a rusted-out minifridge, leaving damp walls, two new beds, and a ceiling fan that worked beautifully only if the fluorescent light attached to it was on. The windows were painted shut; the door painted open. Since I found it difficult to sleep beneath the glare of a light that would have made the most hardened criminal divulge all her secrets, I dragged in some patio furniture and constructed a make-shift ladder that enabled me to take the light apart and get the fan to function in pitch darkness. Then I lay down and thought of Vermont.

At home, depending on how the wind is blowing, I hear the noise of interstate highway 91 from my bedroom window. For years, I have been telling myself it is the ocean. Funny enough, on Grand Turks, the ocean sounds exactly like highway 91! All night, I could hear the semis rolling by in the waves and the local feral dogs howling just like their northern coyote cousins in that way that bluegrass music is reminiscent of its Celtic origins.

The next morning, and every morning thereafter for the next four days, a mysterious remote control appeared on the doorstep. I have no idea what they were for. Each one was a different size and shape. Perhaps they were brought by the stray dogs that slept outside the door at night. There was also a random donkey in the front garden. A real donkey. The donkeys roam the island in perfect freedom, descendants of those turned loose from the salt works in the 1960’s. It turns out that there are also quasi-feral, though highly social, horses and cows adrift on the island—totally my idea of Paradise. You would not have imagined southern Vermont and a tropical island could have so very much in common.

I had to wait a full day for my son to arrive. I had no idea where to go or what to do. People with ADHD often struggle in unstructured situations. I felt like the Spaniard in “The Princess Bride,” waiting for Vecini to show up and give my life direction. I had no access to Wi-Fi, so I crawled on the ground for half an hour and tried to photograph a hermit crab going about its daily errands. It was definitely worth getting permanent gravel dents in my knees. It was the most satisfying and relaxing thirty minutes I had spent in months. I think I caught him smiling. I’m sure of it. Every Free thing wears a soft little smile somewhere, even if that freedom is fraught with marauding gulls and threats of unthinking boots.

By the time my son arrived, I was abuzz with questions, most of which can be sorted into two categories: “where are we supposed to be?” and “what should we be doing?" He was very patient. He said, “Look, what time do you wake up?”

“Usually around five am,” I said. He rolled his eyes.

“Good. From five to seven, I think you should read or write. From seven to eight, you should walk or run, at eight, have a cup of tea using the tea bags you brought in your fiddle case. From nine to ten, you could do any of the above again or just panic—your choice. The Plan is that there is NO plan. That is what ‘vacation’ means. You do not have to show up for anything or anyone. Just don’t wake me up before ten. We’ll go swimming at ten.”

And so it was. Every morning, I amused myself for five hours using nothing more than a journal, a pen, and a first edition of O.Henry’s Of Cabbages and Kings, then went swimming with him (my son that is, not O.Henry). And by ‘swim’ I mean ‘floated with languid, occasional use of arms and legs as we bobbed over placid waves.’ Sometimes, we “swam” for four hours at a time, looking through crystal waters at the reef creatures or just floating and talking. The Flight Attendant was right. I WAS sitting on a flotation device. It was me own arse—so buoyant in fact that I could not manage to get myself much below the surface of the highly salinized water, before snapping up like a cork. The young and bum-less were able to linger in front of a cave containing a puffer fish, while I only caught fleeting glances of a little fishy smirk before being yanked to the surface.

Every evening, there were jam sessions or concerts at random, tricky to predict locations. The musicians would play until dawn, sleep until noon, then spend whole afternoons just hanging in liquid salinity, gossiping and chatting. One told me about the time the water was suddenly filled with gorgeous women their own age—it turned out a cruise ship had caught fire. He said it wistfully, with one eye on horizon, scanning for smoke.

One particularly poetic and astute young soul swept his hand across the waves and gestured towards the shoreline. Some of the places were cheerfully painted, others looked like bombed out wrecks that had never been rebuilt after a series of concurrent hurricanes had struck a few years ago.

“If you think about it—this place is so amazing and so beautiful but it’s kind of tragic too. The island can’t grow anything worth eating—except by donkeys—and it doesn’t produce much now that it doesn’t make salt. All it has is this shabby sort of exquisite beauty and clean drinking water to refill the tanks on the cruise ships that stop by daily. And when too many stop by in a row, the local taps run with mud until the well refills. Everyone here is poor except for the super rich. Everything operates in languishing chaos. Nothing is ever efficient on an island—it’s dependent on trade and all the vagaries of weather. Pretty much everything about this is kind of awful…except that it’s just Perfect. It’s Paradise!”

I couldn’t agree more. I loved every minute of it.

A good vacation, one where your shower comes equipped with its very own mosquito farm, makes you both grateful you went and grateful to be home. That phrase was the best souvenir of my trip and has come to embody everything I love about life on my island homestead here in southern Vermont, where everything is both scrounged and savored, staggeringly impoverished yet richly blessed, abundant but slightly desecrated. From smashing ice out of the sheep’s water buckets, to the state of the tools scattered in the garage, to the way the wood stove adds so much extra dirt to the kitchen…everything about this is kind of awful…except that it’s just Perfect. It’s Paradise without the palm trees.

I think that is the essence of Gratitude: To appreciate the absurdities of and to hold with humility, horror, and humor what it means to be alive—whether we are hermit crabs or crabby humans. The whole world is being tugged and torn at its edges by the Greedy, the Cruel, and the Uncaring. And yet, there still is beauty in the rainbows after the rain, in those who are feral yet gentle, in those who have the true freedom to look around them and smile, despite the dangers.

Thank you, Dear Ones, for all you are doing to stitch things up a little, to keep the Darkness at bay, to keep laughing, and keep others Hoping. Take breaks when you need them. Remember your seat can be used as a flotation device. Stay in Amusement if you can. True power is always with those who can laugh.

I love you SEW much,

Yours aye,

Nancy