How do I begin to describe how my life has unfolded over the past decade? When I tell people I showed up in the Bahamas on my sailboat to a remote and breathtakingly beautiful island, met my future husband, and then spent those earlier years island hopping around these strange lands, I generally get a look of disbelief.
Upon returning to Harbour Island after being away for one year, I was surprised with the warm reception I received. Several people have even said "welcome home" to me. The first time I heard it, I was taken aback. Even though I lived there for 2 1/2 years, I never really considered Harbour Island home...
I had waited for the plane to arrive from a safe vantage point outside of the chain link fence and watched it silently glide in and touch down. The plane began to slow as it passed mid-runway and suddenly I saw the pop of the tire and the plane lurched to the right. The tire flopped to the side of the rim and the plane came to a halt on the active runway.
I have been singing "The Banana Boat Song" aka "Day-O" for three days. All I want to do is go home. To be fair, Sunday was a last minute day. We got a phone call from the supply boat captain early in the morning to let us know that he was heading back to Nassau. We had about an hour to try and compile our larger items and get them to his boat..
Mark and I are going full circle. Well, we thought we had already gone full circle, but to our surprise, we had one more notch to go to complete the radius. Mark called Nassau home for almost 20 years prior to moving out to a remote island in the Exumas where fate was destined for us to meet. The island was Norman's Cay - population of about 7 people at the time...
My husband and I have recently jumped overboard from the ship of reality. We moved from an already small island with a population of about 2,000 people during peak season, to an island with about 20 people on a crowded day. This island has one restaurant, an airstrip, and a long, bumpy dirt road that runs the length of its 6 mile fishhook shape...
One Saturday afternoon we arranged for some of the construction crew to help clear the bush to make a pathway to the beach. We were ecstatic about having quick access to the beach so I was impatient about being able to use it. Once the pathway was cleared, I grabbed the dogs and a beach towel and bounded down my path.
My name is Barley and I’m a mature 57 years old. (That’s calculated into human years for you. I did you a favor and translated it as I know humans have a hard time with tricky conversions like Fahrenheit/Celsius, miles/kilometers, and human/dog years). And just to be clear, that’s Barley with a “B”. Ever since that movie about the yellow Lab became popular, I am constantly being mistaken for a Marley. It’s Barley and yes, my name is unique – just like me.
I popped to the store quickly to pick up a few things and was a little shocked as to how depleted my cash funds were upon my return home. I've been grocery shopping on Harbour Island for quite some time now, but it still never ceases to amaze me how expensive things are. Nothing in my shopping basket was organic and the fanciest thing is some uncured bacon.
If I had any marbles left after living on this crazy rock for 2 years, I may have just seen the last one go rolling out the door, down the street and drop into the depths ocean. Let me just say, power outages 4+ times a day is enough to send one to the loony bin but if you are the type of person who can brush something like that off, then you are already well-suited to island life. I, as it seems, am not...
On my rock, the preferred means of transportation, or trans as it’s commonly referred to, is a golf cart. But not just any old golf cart that your average snowbird tootles around in their South Florida retirement community. No these carts have style. And “style” is all relative to how one wishes to portray their island image. Meaning....anything goes.
My life tends to feel like a permanent vacation, which ends up making it slightly difficult to uphold any level of motivation to exercise regularly. Pair that with the fact that 357 days of the year it is 85 degrees plus… equal that for the level of humidity. So I’m already sweating by the time I wake up in the morning, throw in a load of laundry, and walk out to the street to take the garbage out.
