Home by Another Way

by Robert Benson

  I grew up thinking this was the way you were supposed to travel. I still think she is right, especially if you are going away on business. The people who have hired you to be away with them, speaking or retreating or conferencing with them for a few days or weeks, cannot always be trusted to remember you really do not want to be away from home in the first place. One of my friends who travels and speaks a great deal more than I do says people think they pay her to speak. “I would listen to myself talk for free,” she says. “What they are really paying me for is to be away from home.”

  Home is where you find it, people say. My mother taught me that, if you have to, sometimes you can find it in your suitcase.

  We are book people, Sara and I. Between us, we have been writing them and selling them and editing them and reading them and representing them for most of our adult lives. We have been collecting them too.

  It would be embarrassing for me to say how many books we own. I am not sure I can tell you how many books we own. I can tell you that based on my rough measurements—measuring the shelves in our house and in my studio and the boxes we have in storage—that if you were to line them up side by side the way that you do on a bookshelf, we have about two hundred yards of books. If Barry Bonds stood at one end and tried to hit a ball to the other end, he could hit two home runs into McCovey Cove before he would get to the end of our line of books.

  We had some shelves built into the walls of our dining room not too long ago, and we filled the shelves from floor to ceiling with books. It is like eating dinner in a library. We brought two dozen boxes of books from storage to fill the shelves. We told ourselves for months we could get rid of a fair amount of them as we went through the boxes. In the end, we only gave away about a half dozen or so. How can you give away old friends you have loved and have not seen in such a long time?

  These days, when we go to St. Cecilia, we are down to mostly hauling books. Partly because I cannot afford to hire the small jet it would take to get us and all the other stuff down there. Partly because St. Cecilia has been changing me. I am trying to figure out how to pack and carry what are essentially the nonessential essentials, whatever that means.

  I still believe you gotta have your stuff. I just don’t gotta have so much of it as I once thought I did.

  Everything about being in St. Cecilia is simpler. The more that it becomes home to us, we find it takes less and less stuff to make it so.

  The house has a little bit of a kitchen to cook in. It is small enough that you can reach nearly everything while standing in one place. It has enough dishes and utensils to do the job and yet not enough so you can pass on cleaning up after yourself as you go. If you do not wash out the cups after you use them, there will be nothing clean when you go to have tea. If you do not wash things and dry them and put them away, then there is no room to make a sandwich when you are ready for lunch.

  There is a room that is both a living room and a dining room. It is where one of you sits and talks while the other one is cooking in the kitchen. The kitchen will hold the two of you but only if you have your arms around each other. Which happens here in the tropics from time to time, but it tends to delay mealtime.

  This one room is where you eat and where you play cards and where you sit late into the evening to read. One of my favorite things about this room is that it will hold so little it only takes about three minutes to pick it all up before bedtime, so it is neat and clean in the morning when we rise. Most all of the stuff we need to feel at home in St. Cecilia will fit on the coffee table.

  The bedroom has a bed in it and a pair of nightstands to hold the lamps you need so you can read at night. It has a small closet and some shelves for the clothes you need as long as you did not give in to the urge to bring more than you have shelves for.

  If you need more stuff, you would have a hard time finding a place to put it.

  You would also have a hard time finding much more stuff on St. Cecilia.

  On our first trip to St. Cecilia, we set out one afternoon to do some shopping before it was time to head home. We wanted to take something home to the children and to the people who watched out for our house and our children and our cats while we were gone. Then it occurred to us we might do a bit of Christmas shopping while we were at it.

  We like to think of ourselves as discriminating when it comes to buying gifts. Most people think that about themselves, I am sure, but we have a kind of congenital disdain for certain kinds of things that people often buy when they travel—we are not really big on T-shirts with slogans or shot glasses with St. Cecilia written on them. So we set out to look for other things.

  Here is the thing we discovered. There is nothing much to buy on St. Cecilia. We went in and out of all sorts of places, and the truth is, we ended up with most of our money still in our wallets.

  We have discovered that while you are in St. Cecilia, once you have paid for a place to stay, you spend your money on food and supplies and newspapers. There is not much else to spend it on.

  We did make a trip out to Newcastle one day to buy some pottery from Mrs. Jamison. She fires it on the ground, without a kiln. She covers it with palm branches and then covers the palm branches with old corrugated metal roofing to bank the fire and to hold the heat in. We drove right by it the first time; we thought it was just a lady burning trash in her backyard. It turns out she was making art.

  There is a pair of art galleries on the island with a fair number of works by local painters and photographers. Photographs and paintings never do justice to the beauty of this place; one has to see it to see it. But we bought some cards and some replicas of old maps one time, just to take back to the States to scatter around the house so that when the weather is cold and the world is brown, we can look at the pictures and remember.

  The next time we go, I am going to visit the beekeepers’ farm. The British brought honeybees to the island about three hundred years ago. After three hundred years, there are 147 working colonies of bees on the islands. I have no idea how many bees that means are here now. The word is that the honey from St. Cecilia has an exotic flavor for some reason no one understands, and they win international awards for it. The locals say the exotic flavor comes from the exotic flowers. Evidently what you feed a bee makes a difference. I read about the honey on the plane home the last time, but I mean to have me some as soon as I get back.

  But beyond those few things, there is not much to buy.

  Now I realize we have an advantage that people who live on the island do not have. For one, we have brought with us a supply of books to read while we are there and do not have to figure out how to buy them on the island. Which works out well since there are not many places to buy books.

  I also recognize we do not have to go to work in an office every day and do not have to have a wardrobe that will suit such endeavors. On the days I do my work when I am there, and I have worked during a couple of visits (honest, I did), I can do it in my bathing suit while sitting around the pool. I do not need meeting clothes in St. Cecilia. I hardly need them in the States. I am not much of a meeting guy, really.

  But still there is this sense that wherever you go on the island, less is always rather more in some way. I also get the sense that no one seems particularly disturbed by this.

  One afternoon when we were riding around on the windward side of the island, we stumbled on to a curious little village, a historic site, showing the way that the St. Cecilian house had developed over the years.

  There were maybe a dozen buildings. Some were authentic reproductions; some were original buildings that had been moved to the village and restored. Mr. Adamsgate showed us around.

  It was a fascinating thing to start out walking through a small thatched hut and then to work our way through the village into the present time. It is a time-travel trip through the decades and the centuries. We could see how the houses became sturdier and prettier and certainly more livable, but we could also see how they had retained a kind of basic simplicity
that washed over us when we walked through them.

  The little houses reminded me of a place I go on retreat sometimes, in the mountains south of my home, a place called St. Mary’s. When I have been able to arrange it, I have spent as much as a week there, staying alone in a one-room cottage they call the Hermitage.

  It is an old sandstone structure that was originally the sacristy of a chapel that burned to the ground back in the thirties. Only the sacristy survived the fire.

  It has a bed and a table and a log-burning stove for heat. It has a tiny kitchen, a kind of galley, with a sink and a refrigerator and a stove. It has a bathroom with a shower. It has everything you need if you do not happen to need too much stuff. When I go on retreat to St. Mary’s, I stay in the Hermitage because it feels like home to me for some reason I can never understand.

  That little hermitage is one of the few places I have ever been—of the places not actually my home—that have ever felt that way to me. But I keep finding such places almost everywhere I turn on St. Cecilia.

  The cottages at Windbreak are a modified version of the traditional St. Cecilia house.

  The St. Cecilia house is small, maybe fifteen by twenty, with high ceilings and windows all around to let the breezes through, taking advantage of the natural ventilation generated by air drafts moving from the Atlantic and over the volcano and through the house. It has louvered shutters on the doors and the windows to keep out the rains and to fight off the hurricanes. It has a sharply sloped roof and a veranda along the front. Many of them have a world of gingerbread on them, or at least that is what Sara calls the bits of latticework and fine fretwork full of whimsy and delight. Decoration board is what St. Cecilians call it.

  The house has a kind of just-enough-ness that washes over you when you walk through it. A simplicity I am reminded of when I walk through my house.

  The first time I walked through a St. Cecilia house, something deep inside me jumped up and starting saying I wanted to live in such a simple house. And something else inside me started asking, What are you going to do with all your stuff?

  I started to ask Mr. Adamsgate what he did with all his stuff, but I decided against it. I had an idea what the answer might be.

  I think our stuff grows on us. At least mine does on me.

  In my house at home, we have a library table that my father found years ago and began to use as a desk. After he passed away, I ended up using it as a desk for a while myself. Now it is our dining table.

  In Sara’s office there is another good-sized dining table that belonged to one of my grandfathers. It is sturdy enough to hold the amount of paper that goes with doing the kind of work Sara does.

  We have a kitchen table we picked up somewhere along the way, one of those old-fashioned enamel-topped tables from the forties. We bought it to go with the kitchen after we redid the kitchen so it would look like Sara’s grandmother’s kitchen.

  So now the table we used to use in the kitchen is in the back hallway. It is a drop-leaf affair I am unwilling to part with because Sara had it before we were married, and it reminds me of those days when we first began to fall in love. We are still at it, by the way. Because we have the table in the hallway, we pile stuff on it so you can hardly get through the hallway to get outside.

  Once you do get outside, there is a long table from the millinery store my great-grandfather owned down on the city square in the town where I grew up. Or at least the base of it came from there. We found it in my grandfather’s basement when he passed away and have been putting a succession of plywood tops on it ever since so we can use it for a buffet table whenever we have parties in the backyard.

  Then there are the large wrought-iron table we eat on outside and the small wrought-iron table we have coffee on sometimes. There are also two wooden tables we bought from a favorite store up the street.

  In my studio there is a long slab of Formica mounted on two stools that functions as a desk for me and a folding sewing table I use sometimes when I go outside to write, something I seldom do, but I keep the table just in case. I think of it this way: just by chance, if I want to write somewhere besides the place I built so that I would have a place to write, and someone is having coffee and eating lunch and throwing a party on all the other tables when it occurs to me to go outside and write, I will still have a table.

  Then there are the two tables in storage and the big oak one my aunt has that she promises will come back to me someday and the big pine table that used to be my desk, the one that made its way to Illinois with my younger brother.

  It would seem that there is a corollary to the “you gotta have your stuff” rule: you gotta have a table to go with it.

  Once when we were driving along a blue highway through the hills in northern Alabama, we passed a sign in front of an antique store proclaiming they were having a sale on “dead people’s stuff.”

  I cannot imagine getting rid of a single one of the tables in my house, let alone the other stuff. China, books, baseball memorabilia, golf clubs that I do not use, and all manner of stuff is simply not up for discussion. That is evident by the fact I keep all of it. In my own defense, I want to say I am loath to part with anything belonging to someone who was my ancestor. Which is why the thought of going to an antique store always gives me the willies, because it means someone has sold off their history.

  I also have to say that not only do I not frequent antique stores, I do not go to yard sales much either. If I do, then things come home with me, and I can barely walk through the things I have now. Discretionary income should be spent on things that are necessary, like books and baseball tickets, I say.

  I do not have charge accounts with people who make furniture. I have not been in a furniture store more than once or twice in the last ten years.

  But I can still barely walk through the house for the tables sometimes. If I could blame it on Sara, I would, but the truth of the matter is, most of the tables are mine. She married into far more tables than she had hoped for, I expect. And of the ones she has, she would be willing to part with some of them, except for the fact that I am so sentimental about them. I could look for someone who will take a few of these off my hands, but I am going to want visitation rights.

  Whenever I get back to Tennessee from St. Cecilia, I want to go through my house and get rid of every third thing. Where did all of this stuff come from? I always wonder.

  The “just enough” quality to life on St. Cecilia always strikes me and always unsettles me and is even beginning to change me. It makes me uneasy about the way we live most of the time back in the States. And I do not feel as though we live very large at our house even when we are in Tennessee.

  Time passes more simply in St. Cecilia, and we are surrounded by less stuff. There are fewer clothes in the closet and on the shelves and in the drawers. There are fewer pots and pans and dishes and such. Lord knows there are fewer tables.

  Sometimes when I am on St. Cecilia, I think of all my stuff back in Tennessee and wonder how it is doing and whether or not it misses me.

  To be sure, I have not yet tried to celebrate Christmas without the three trees we put up each year, or tried to throw a party without a big buffet table, or attempted a dinner for twelve at a table for four while I am in the islands. I have not yet brought my computer here to write, so I have not yet faced the day-to-day hassle of hooking up the printer since there is no desk to leave it on.

  I expect that I could manage living more simply in this St. Cecilian way, but I worry it would not take me long to fill up all the available space with more stuff. Before too long I might have too many tables again and too many books and too many other things. I am worried that the walking contradiction I see when I look in the mirror in the mornings would catch up with me sooner or later.

  Jim Bouton, a major-league baseball pitcher—whom I quoted in another book, back when I thought what he said had to do with baseball and not something else—once said, “You spend your life gripping a baseball, and in the end y
ou find out it was the other way around.”

  I am afraid sometimes I do not really have my stuff but rather my stuff has me.

  “Your heart is where your treasure is,” or so I have heard it said, and I hate to think all my treasure is to be found on my tables and on my shelves.

  Six

  Enter any house that will welcome you,

  share their meal … and there is where

  you will find the kingdom.

  —JESUS OF NAZARETH

  Somewhere between the sunning round and the napping round comes the first major decision of the day. To make major decisions prior to the scribbling round and the feeding of the flock is simply against the rules. To go into the napping round without a clear idea of what the evening meal is going to be like is not acceptable either.

  Wherever we are, we plan some portion of our day around what we will be doing for dinner in the evening and where we plan to be when we have it and whom we plan to have it with. One of the rules of our life together is to be sure that we are very thoughtful about all food events for the day. The rule is as applicable on St. Cecilia as it is anywhere else we happen to be.

  Food is not such serious business to some folks, but it is to us. It could be that we do not have enough to do. It could be that we would rather do this than things we ought to be doing. Or it could be that we have caught on somewhere that sharing a glass of wine and breaking bread together really matter.

  So before we have our nap, we have to review all the possibilities. At our house this is known as the food-event planning meeting.

  The meeting—it is not a formal affair, there are only the two of us on the committee, it can be held in the shower or on the porch or by the pool or in the hallway, and notes are rarely taken—begins when one of us says, “What do you want to do for dinner?” If you are too specific with the first question—“Where would you like to go to eat ribs tonight?” for example—you reveal your hand too quickly, and you cut off the sort of give-and-take that is conducive to domestic tranquillity.