My New Book

These are excerpts from the early chapters of Goat Water Is Not What You Think, a memoir of life on the Caribbean island of Montserrat. My husband and I spent four winters there until we were chased away by the volcano that destroyed our house.

Boxes of the book arrived here by freight a week ago. It's hard to believe that I can hold the several years' project in my hands!

“A fact of island life: Much of the livestock was loose. Goats, particularly, would eat anything and everything. If you cared about your landscaping, you had a sturdy fence and a gate that you kept shut. Mamie, one of our neighbors, showed me the place in our front gate where she and her husband had laced string to keep their goats out.

“We were told more than once that animals on the island were a mark of worth – the larger the herd, the greater the master’s worth. Those who kept animals didn’t necessarily sell them, but they could if they needed cash. Cows, sheep and goats were an investment, rather like shares of Procter and Gamble or General Motors. Anybody who owned 400 sheep or goats was a powerful man or woman indeed….

“The need to cool off after some exertion was a good excuse to sit on the porch and just look at our surroundings. We especially loved to watch the lambs cavorting in a pasture across the street. Often, they would be walking along and suddenly jump straight up, seemingly for no reason except pure joy. When they got tired and hungry and found their mother for a snack, we would turn our attention to the kingbird that had built a nest on a nearby phone pole and divebombed any bird that flew too close.

“It was easy to spend an hour in these pursuits, and somehow we didn’t think the time was being wasted.

“I tried to swim laps in our pool at least every other day after 2 p.m. I loved to watch palm fronds gently swaying in the trade winds as I did the backstroke to and fro. Despite the sun and the location 17 degrees from the Equator, we discovered, to our surprise, that 80 degrees with a stiff breeze was a bit too chilly for swimming. The next day would be calmer. We counted on that.

Transplanted Americans, Brits and Canadians who lived on the island full-time told us they didn’t swim from late November until, perhaps, early March. Sometimes, the thermometer went down to 68 degrees at night. The health department then would put out an urgent plea for the donation of blankets because poor old people were suffering. Nobody had a furnace. And many closed their windows with ill-fitting wooden shutters rather than glass….”

Our Montserrat house before the volcano

“One of the lovable characters we met early in our first year on the island was Katy Connor, the veg-e-TAY-ble lady. When we first saw her, she was walking past our gate carrying satchels of fruits and vegetables. She wore an old felt hat squashed down on her head, covering grizzled, gray pigtails….

“After we had bought some fruits and vegetables from her, we invited her up to our porch to have a cold drink. She told us that she used to bring three of her four children down to Spanish Point, our neighborhood, to help her carry produce. Her home was at least two miles up the hill – or the mountain, if you will – from us. She said her children were all grown up with their own lives to live. Her doctor didn’t want her carrying so much, but, she said, she didn’t pay any attention.

“One of the things she told us that first day was her “Hugo story,” what happened to her during the 1989 Hurricane Hugo, which devastated the island. Ed, my husband, first became acquainted with the island when he went with a work team from the States to help rebuild houses.

“Katy, knowing that her wooden shack might not be safe during the worst of the storm, took Mark, a mentally challenged son, and went to the home of a friend, whose wooden house had a concrete-block addition.

“As she was walking toward her neighborhood when the storm abated, someone told her that her house had blown away and could be found “in de ghaut,” (ravine) down the hill from its previous spot. When she checked to see for herself, she discovered that the roof had caved in around the foundation before the rest blew away, along with all her belongings, which were strewn around on the ground “all mucked up.”

Despite what had happened to her, Katy remained unfailingly cheerful. It was a trait common to Montserratians – and, we thought – worth emulating.

Books are available at www.Amazon.com and at the publisher, www.HawthornePub.com. 

An Introduction to Our Friend

     Here is an excerpt from my book Goat Water Is Not What You Think, which will be published in early February. The book chronicles our four winters on the Caribbean island of Montserrat, leading up to the volcanic eruption which destroyed our house, killed 19 people and made two-thirds of the island uninhabitable. 

     William Owensby, our neighbor down the hill, arrived at our front gate with a burlap sack full of banana shoots and his cutlass to plant MY banana plantation—the plantation that within a few months would feed our family and, if we were lucky, half of Spanish Point, as our subdivision was known, with lovely bananas. Or so I fantasized.

     William had timed his arrival to plant, he said, “by the moon, two days after the first quarter.” This was a serious thing and had to be strictly adhered to. He said all this without even the hint of a smile, so I didn’t smile either….

     Every now and then, William would appear at our gate with goat meat meant as a gift. The first time this happened he said he had made his kill that morning. I asked, “Oh, which one?” He said it was the little male I’d seen running around with his twin, a female I had named “Nice Girl.”

     I said, “Oh, poor thing.” I felt kind of sad.

     William shrugged. “He should know that’s what he was born for.” Females were jealously guarded because they could produce more young. But the life of the male goat – except for big billy – wasn’t worth much.

     I thanked him for the plastic bag containing the goat roast and another containing a big piece of cake that his wife Mamie had baked. We ate the cake right away, but we put the goat in the freezer. In two weeks, when I got up the nerve to thaw it out and cook it, we could pretend it had come from the grocery store. We came to call this ploy “running it through the freezer.”

     Watch here for information abou how you can get a copy of my book.

   

Some Angels Don't Have Wings

When we go out on our daily walk, our happy rescue dog, Sienna, has to be kept on a relatively short leash because she eats everything, and I do mean everything. She is sneaky about this. Unless we keep our eyes on her at all times, she snarfs up doggy delicacies. Her favorite is small cones from the pine trees which grow around here. Second on her list are grass clumps that fall off lawn mowers and dry in the sun.

But there are sometimes other things, unknown things, and therein lies the problem.

Most of the treasures she eats don't harm her overall digestive health, but, alas, sometimes they do. On one occasion recently, she began - how can I say this delicately - running at both ends. She obviously didn't feel well; she wasn't hungry even for her dinner and was drinking a lot of water. She at least knew not to get dehydrated.

We waited one day to see if the situation wouldn't get better on its own. It didn't. In fact, she seemed to be worse. So Ed made an appointment with our vet, a great, tall bear of a guy with a heart to match.

He heard the symptoms, listened to her heart, looked in her ears, and did all the other things that an examination of the sick might require, all while squatting down at her level and finally said, "Sienna, did you eat a bad lizard?"  (Well, that definitely was a possibility, as our island is overrun with what are called "a-NO-lees." And these are known to make cats sick. Dogs, I'd never heard. We didn't see Sienna eat such a thing, but I suppose she could have, when we weren't looking.)

After checking a stool sample and finding no parasites, the vet prescribed a medication for each end of Sienna and an antibiotic, just in case. Then he squatted down at her level again, and she wagged her tail and nuzzled up close so he could pet her and love her and tell her everything was going to be okay. Then, in a soft voice, he asked her, "Will you forgive me for taking your temperature?"

It's wrenching when your baby gets sick, and thank heavens there are angels to help.

Not Your Mother's Fruitcake

I have just made eight fruitcakes to give as holiday gifts, and I wanted to share the recipe, which is different, probably, from anything you've ever tasted and so delicious. No marinating the cakes in booze for weeks. No heavy molasses taste.

A friend, who always writes a newsy run-down of her family's activities for the year, included the recipe, which I read and immediately said, "Wow, that's for me."

(So much easier than the cookies I used to make.)

Here goes:

2 cups sugar                                        1 tsp. soda

1 cup butter, softened                         1 tsp. vanilla

4 eggs                                                  2 cups chopped dates

3 1/2 cups flour                                   2 cups chopped nuts (I used walnuts.)

1/2 cup buttermilk

1 tsp.baking powder

14 oz. pkg. flaked coconut

1# candy orange slices (chopped)

1 cup red and green candied cherries (chopped)

Cream sugar and butter. Add eggs and mix well. Add remaining ingredients and blend. (I blended the "wet" ingredients with a mixer, then added the fruits and nuts and continued mixing with my hands.) Spoon the thick batter into greased and floured loaf pans Aluminum throw-aways are good. Alternatively, you could use one bundt pan. Bake at 250 degrees for 2-3 hours - less time if using loaf pans, more for a single bundt pan. The cakes are done when a toothpick comes out clean and the top is brown. My oven took 2 hours 20 minutes for four loaf pans.

Where in the World is Montserrat?

Right now, I'm reading page proofs for my book Goat Water Is Not What You Think: The Montserrat Island Life of Two Hoosiers and the Volcano That Ended It. The publication date will be sometime in the early spring of 2014! 

Several people have asked me where the island of Montserrat is located. Although it is relatively unknown as a vacation destination and sometimes is omitted altogether from maps of the Caribbean, Montserrat lies 27 miles southwest of Antigua, which is a well-known cruise ship stop-off. St. Kitts is about the same distance to the northwest. On a clear day, both can be seen from Montserrat.

All three of the above-mentioned islands are part of a long chain extending from Puerto Rico in the north and continuing south to the coast of Venezuela. A lot of these islands are ports of call for winter-weary North Americans.

Most Caribbean islands were formed by volcanic activity, either long since ended or at least quiet for now. A volcano on Montserrat, unfortunately, came to life in 1995 and over the intervening years has destroyed the southern two-thirds of the island. That substantial chunk of Montserrat remains a "no go zone."

Montserrat's volcano

How long will it remain so? Will it never be inhabited again? You can never say never, I suppose. This past summer, we visited Pompeii, which is in southern Italy near Naples and Sorrento. Over the years, people have moved back into the shadow of Mt. Vesuvius, which erupted and destroyed Pompeii and Herculaneum in 79 AD. Its last eruption was in 1944, but another "Big One" is expected.     

An October-November Surprise

It is fall in southwest Florida, which means that a few trees, like the bald cypress and the frangipani, are losing their needles/leaves and will remain naked all winter. They are in the minority, however, and most gardens remain green, which is one reason snowbirds like to congregate here. It isn't only the warm breezes and the blue skies that attract them.

We have another deciduous plant that also loses its leaves, but follows that phase almost immediately with extravagant blooms, all the better to ward off our version of winter. These flowers, in various shades of pink, will stay on the trees almost until it's time to leaf out again. Called the silk floss tree, this fall stunner is a relative of the kapok.

Next spring, the silk floss tree will sport, along with its new leaves, avocado-size pods containing silky threads, but they are not as good as kapok for stuffing. The silk floss tree has a couple of other strange characteristics. The trunk is bulbous at the bottom and is covered with nasty-looking thorns.

A similar, but unrelated, tree on St. John in the Virgin Islands is called the "monkey no climb tree."

After a Long Summer

I know I've not been blogging for a long time, and here is the reason: I have spent the last five months completely rewriting a book I've written - with the working title of Goat Water Is Not What You Think: The Montserrat life of two Hoosiers and the volcano that ended it.

The book will be out in the first half of 1914! I finished the fifth run-through of the manuscript Saturday and sent it off to the publisher. Next, I will help select what photos will be included, help with the cover design, go through the manuscript for errors, and help plan how the book will be marketed. I'll have a lot of work to do between now and publication day.

As you can imagine, this is a very exciting time for me.

Back in the early 1960s, I wrote a novel, which was turned down by about 25 publishers before I shelved it. I haven't looked at it since, but I can imagine it is really terrible -although I received several hopeful rejection letters. Later in the 1960s, I wrote a short book about our experiences in the U.S. Army; it too failed to find a publisher.

But I am not one to quit; I thought our lives on the island of Montserrat - including the build-up to the volcano - were so interesting I wanted to share what happened to us. From time to time between now and the Spring, I'll share some snippets of the Montserrat years with you.

I hope you are all well and happy!

Carol