Revolving Island

So something has been brewing under the surface...something made of tumult, violent evolution, & well, change.  Oh, & there's also a submarine volcano with a ridiculous name that has people a little concerned.  Not to be flippant in a potentially serious moment, but the volcano, Kick 'em Jenny isn't the only oddly named thing around Grenada.  The man they're trusting for instruction in this time of concern is their leader, Prime Minister Nimrod.  I'm just sayin'.
 
But that's not the upheaval I'm thinking about tonight.
 
Twenty-three years here in the perpetually transient culture that is island life, & I'm no longer shocked when singles, couples or families with one, five, or even ten years of St. Croix life under their belts pack up & head back to what so many call 'the real world.' Part of life this far away is goodbye, good luck, & begin again.  The first few times it happens startle you, the next few may dismay, and occasionally you have the sensation that everybody is bugging out, but if you have chosen this as your life you shake it off & plug on.   

My island life (to date) has been assembled from a lot of inconsistencies--five rentals before I bought, the same number of vehicles, ranging from island beaters to a fancy hybrid & back to basic transport again, for want of a better term, 'love interests' that were fairly equally divided between wonderful & horrible but either they or I knew weren't in it for the duration, a spate of jobs & entrepreneurial ventures with a similar arc to my vehicle purchases.  And by all these, I've been transported to this place I can best describe by cribbing from the Amish: 'to come right 'round to where I ought to be.' It seems I fall in love with, & am far more fiercely attached to places than I have been to people. Maybe that comes from my Grandfather, the farmer on a heart-stoppingly beautiful & isolated bit of land in West Virginia, so many years ago. 

Love of place might be genetic or learned, but however it happened, I've got it & I wouldn't relinquish it for love nor...oh wait, we just covered that.

That said, some people are so much a part of your daily island life that you don't know how to think of this place without them, if you're lucky.  I've been that lucky for seventeen years. 

The revolving door spins again on Tuesday, and we begin again.