On Poseidon & Procrastination

Pendants I make with my sea glass finds (www.fromthecjewelry.com)

Last night’s swim was an afterthought…that morphed into unfettered joy.  More about that in a moment.  First, a note about procrastination, a favorite hobby. 

Turns out I can procrastinate about anything—even things I LOVE to do.  Swimming is the perfect example.  One thing you’re accustomed to stateside that you give up here in the Caribbean is the notion of twilight.  We just don’t have it.  We go from sunset to full darkness in what seems like the flip of a switch. 

After 21 years here, I’m used to that & don’t really miss it…until I’m taking my after-work swim.  If I start for the beach at 4:45 I’ll have a full hour to swim & search for sea glass before I’m plunged into murk & everything I pick up looks like or is a rock.  I live 12 minutes from the beach, door to shore.  Sunset now is at 6:10, & I’ll be able to see my quarry for exactly 6 minutes after that & before everything that brushes my leg as I swim becomes an imaginary eel.  I love all sea creatures, except eels.  They are basically big-mouthed snakes underwater, some with the added fun of being electrified, & who needs that combo? 

I keep my towel, suit, mask/ snorkel & collection bag on a hall tree I painted aqua to go with the other craziness on my porch.  I like to have them all together & ready, like a firefighter’s gear…except I’m going to water, not fire.  I’d always be early to swim, if it weren’t for Sun-dried Tomato flavor Wheat Thins.  I work through lunch & I’m hungry when I get home, hence the allure of the aforementioned.  Crackers lead to water, then to mouthwash & tooth-brushing before I jump in my gear & head west. 

Non-Judgy Mu, Happy I'm staying home

And when I’m running late & my dog looks at me judgmentally for thinking of leaving her again after being at work already, I sometimes lose resolve & end up staying home.  Of course I never know what I missed at the beach, but it is human nature to think that you’ve missed something great by being a slacker & staying home…& I am human despite my gills. 

So last night I answered the Wheat Thins & was about to (literally) throw in the towel on my plans to swim when the beebeebeep of an incoming text sounded & there was a picture of my first boyfriend Chris, standing in a snowdrift in North Carolina.  He had taken a snow day from work & that picture gave me the required shove to get out the door & head West. 

The surf was doing the regular push/pull, but the unusually strong undertow from last week has left the building & Neptune & I are buddies again.  All last week’s churning unearthed some wonderful sea glass, & I pulled in several pounds of good pieces in an hour, in about a 25’ stretch of beach.  There was a lot of ‘live entertainment’ as well, in the form of many huge schools of fish, seemingly organized by grade order.  First I swam in a ‘herd’ of neon-sized (Kindergarten?) sprat & three graduated sized schools later, I was with a bunch big enough to be working on their post-grad studies. 

So thanks, Chris, for the arctic motivation.  Hope you & NC thaw soon & you have an early spring.  That’s the best I can wish for you, while I’m paddling about in the surf & watching the sunset.  Sorry!

Christmas in Paradise, by Lea Ann Robson

Eighteen years ago I thwart

My 'From the C' vending booth by the ships

ed the definition of insanity by realizing it would always be freezing in WV if I went home for Christmas.  So I decided to flip-flop vacation days to summer & instead spent the Holidays in my new home of St. Croix in the US Virgin Islands. 

The upsides:

1.        Santa wears jams & plays steel pan.

2.       Every Caribbean island has their version of Carnival at a different time of year, & St. Croix’s is the Crucian Christmas Festival.

3.       Fruitcake ships well.

The downsides:

1.         Without a really obvious change in weather, there were no external cues to tell you to shop & ship any gifts you had hope for the recipients to get by Christmas.

2.       How do you make it Christmas when you’re still sweating?

3.       Fruitcake ships well. (Just kidding—my Mom’s fruitcake is fab & has never suffered from a drizzle of the local Cruzan rum I have occasionally added.  It’s just that fruitcake is such an easy target!)

After I committed to Christmas in St. Croix, I set about figuring out ways to ‘Holiday it up.’  The most obvious would happen by accident.  I needed something from the hardware (read ‘general’) store, no doubt to replace something that rusted.  Aside:  If I calculated the percentage of my life here replacing items that rusted, I’d probably realize that I could have pursued a career in neurosurgery or the like with that time).  Our major hardware store, I found soon after I moved here, served many more functions than rust prevention & maintenance.  It was run by a couple who understood the ‘continental’ (island speak for imported statesiders) need to shop.  They carried a full array of hardware necessities, but realized empty space in their shipping containers could be filled with fun housewares—dishes/glasses/pots/pans/linens, etc. & that those would be the items that would prove irresistible to us all. 

My 'From the C' vending booth at the holidays

At Holiday time, their stock magically transformed to the most remarkable array of ornaments & Christmas décor imaginable.  They would travel to gift shows every year to source the fun, the frivolous, & the enchanting.  And then they did the unthinkable…& the thing that really makes it Christmas here.

They imported real Christmas trees!

When I got out of my car in the parking lot, I was hit by the scent of real pine & I realized THAT is what makes it Christmas to me.  So I left the store with a replacement part for something that rusted & broke in my toilet…& a big, fat, smelly CHRISTMAS TREE strapped to my rusty roof rack!

It was only after I had cut it loose & put it to soak in a bucket of sappy water in my back yard that I realized…I got rid of all my ornaments before I moved here.  I had nothing to put on the tree.  I had been so thrilled to see trees & wreaths that I forgot my ex & I had moved here via the Post Office.  If it didn’t fit in a box acceptable under the postal size requirements, or if we deemed it so fragile we sold it or gave it away before we made the move, it didn’t come along for the ride.  So my ornaments were all over the states now, with friends, family & strangers who had bought them at our pre-move yard sales. 

Initial regret was replaced with the thought perhaps that was how it should be—the past scattered behind, replaced by the need for something new & different to represent the radical change in our lives.  That sounded good, but I realized we were still on a very tight budget, having taken jobs we weren’t really qualified for at white-knuckle pay cuts.  On top of the cost concerns, there was the disconcerting fact that the first 5 years we lived here saw very active hurricane seasons—not exactly conducive to amassing big collections of breakables. 

So I pulled from a family* skill set & looked at ways to make ornaments from what I had.  (*My Grandfather was a collector of all things that might ever be useful—with epic stacks of items from twine to foil, to the heavy aluminum pie plates from his weekly favorite pineapple pies ).  I had been walking on the beach every day & picking up scads of sea glass.  As with most who love beach combing, I had filled most of the containers in my house with the beautiful shards…& then watched them collect dust. 

'Bamboo Wrap' sea glass necklace

After a series of ‘real world’ jobs, my ex & I had remembered we moved to an island for a DIFFERENT life, & opened our own business.  It was a 3000 square foot consignment warehouse, chock full of all manner of stuff, from appliances to furniture to books to tools we didn’t understand…& a huge spool of welding wire.  After investigating the malleability of the wire, I paid the full ticket price of $10 for the huge spool, took it home & started experimenting with wrapping the wire in various ways around the chunks of sea glass, all in the hope of creating a stunning ornament collection for my live tree. 

To call that first year’s efforts abstract would be a kindness.  Ugly as sin would be a more apt description.  The saving grace was that most were Heineken green & to an extent disappeared in the green (& now brown, after a few days in our climate) limbs.  At least the tree smelled great…as it expired in the heat!

And now it is 20 years later & I’m plotting where my tree will go this year while I work like a caffeine crazed elf, making the line of whimsical sea glass ornaments that formed the basis of my company, From the C Jewelry.   Boggles the mind to realize those ornaments & the related line of jewelry are now spread much farther than my childhood ornament collection.  Visitors to St. Croix have carted them back to Denmark, to Seattle, to Paris, to Germany & to RUSSIA.  They took with them the accompanying card that explains the formation of sea glass & the fact that every item is made by my hand from authentic  St. Croix sea glass.  Stores in St. Croix & stateside are now carrying lines From the C & after years of pleading cyber-ignorance, I’ve launched a useful website with photos & descriptions for those who prefer to shop from home. 

And the newest addition:  this morning I began this blog to chronicle the quirky & challenging fun of life in paradise.   I’m adding a link from my website, fromthecjewelry.com so you can see what is going on in this special part of the world.  Stay tuned, but now I’m going to celebrate with a swim!