ABlog

Yesterday the drizzly overcast sky, which made the house seem so gloomy, wrapped the Botanic Garden in supple gray allure. Granite boulders acquired a silver sheen. The several trunks of a great dark-bodied elm showed off their polished, handsome volume, strong as a muscled leg. A cardinal—a male—flew low across the path, the small insurgency of his color like a muted cry.

This was not the scarlet of Flamboyant blossoms.

Two months ago, I landed at Point Salines, the airport begun with Cuban assistance during the Bishop years and finished after the U.S. invasion. It wasn’t until we’d exited the plane that I noticed the bright, bunched blooms among the stands of green foliage. From the distance of Brooklyn, I’d known, of course, that we’d be traveling to Grenada in the rainy season, but the timing had been an abstract thing to me. I’d forgotten it would entail these blazing clots of color.

The low, wide-branched trees were stripped bare in places, probably damage from Ivan or Emily, the recent hurricanes.

We stayed for two weeks as spent blossoms rained down, the litter they made on the gravel beneath the clothes line looking from a distance like the red-orange plastic shards of a car’s shattered tail light. It only took one or two flowers to ruin my new tank top, marking the front with a muddy food-like stain before I got a chance to wear it.

Harassed endlessly by the plentiful mosquitoes, I plunged into the sea and swam under a rainbow. Prevented from making out the delicate features of the shore by the absence of my glasses, which I’d left on a log underneath my sandy hat, I was nevertheless able to gauge my whereabouts by seeing how close I’d come to a grouping of three Flamboyant trees in a ragged field: two of the usual scarlet and a rarer yellow one.

II.

The weather on earth is always beautiful.

Early on the morning of the drizzly day in which I walked in the garden, I’d been reading about claims by the British chemist James E. Lovelock that our planet is headed for a much hotter climate set point, a stable state it’s been in many times in the past, an average of about 14 degrees warmer than now in North America. If that happens, Lovelock asserts, only a few lumps of land near the poles, a few surviving islands and continental “oases,” will remain habitable.

I pictured “little” Carriacou, as its affectionate citizens like to call it, and great, mean, rocky Brooklyn swamped beneath the extra water.

It struck me as a fact of singular value—one not lightly to be relinquished—that there should be distinctly different precincts of earth, different atmospheres, a rainbow of microclimates. A time of gray inwardness and a time that shouts with color. A coolness in the morning, a porch angled to catch the breeze. Cities roaring with money and flagrant luxury buckled and held in check by unforgiving, glaciered mountains.

But already I was trying to reconcile myself to the thought of a monochromatic climate. (The article said earth had been in its hot state “many times before in the past”; supposing one viewed the coming obliteration as just part of a natural cycle?)

I wished I were back in my young middle age, being led into the garden by the old gardeners. Made to admire ripeness, swelling contingency; the corn at tassel stage, the star fruit and papaw.

III.

I haven’t yet said how going there feels like being allowed backstage in the drama that animates Brooklyn. This is where the people are formed, people who’ve become my second family, these women who walk along Flatbush Avenue with their cloth coats suspiciously buttoned up to their chins well into May, while everyone else—their grandchildren, first and foremost—rushes to show off flesh. This is the village, “home,” where it’s noisy in the morning with sheep and quarrelling, where she leans over the fence in her house dress and tells me: “I remember when Uncle came to live with us—I was the one who brought him! He must have been two, he’d just started walking. Mammy made me go back to the house and ask for the clothes she’d sent for him when we found out about him. She didn’t like the way his mother had him dressed—some stupidness from a neighbor, made him look like a girl.”

IV.

Sitting on his sea-breeze-catching porch, a man who’s made it to safe harbor leans over and confides: “X has to get himself together, think about his future. That’s what I told him: Think about your future, man. You can’t just sit there saying, ‘But the weather in Carriacou is so beautiful.’ The weather was beautiful when we went to England! We still had to go.”

He gives us, when we’re leaving, a bunch of the small bananas called figs, and a plastic bag stuffed with little sallow mangoes.