IWSG, News and Onward into the fog...er New Year

Posting the First Wednesday of every month, the Insecure Writer's Support Group, is the brainchild of Alex Cavanaugh. YOU can sign up HERE to participate.

Every month a question will be posed that may prompt you to share advice, insight, a personal experience or story. Remember, the question is optional. You can write about anything that relates to your writing journey.

Let's give a warm welcome to our co-hosts:    Erika Beebe, Olga Godim, Sandra Cox, Sarah Foster, and Chemist Ken!

This month's question is: What's the one thing about your writing career you regret the most? Were you able to overcome it?

The only thing I regret about my "writing career" (if you can call it that) is that I didn't start submitting and looking for an agent when I was younger. Though I've written on and off most of my life, I didn't make the effort to get "mainstream published" until I was much older - I won't say how old because now I'm REALLY old and I don't seem to have the drive to spend hours every day at the computer. 

That said, I'm happy and content with what I've done so far. Maybe some other things will get published, maybe not. Either way, it's okay.

***

On that note I'm pleased to share my article in the travel magazine, Destination: US Virgin Islands. This article is about how my grandparents came to own Trunk Bay, considered to be one of the most beautiful and most photographed beaches in the world, and how my grandmother ran a guest house there for years, without electricity.

So, Happy New Year, to me!!

This is my second article with this travel magazine. You can read my first article from 2020, HERE. The company did not print a magazine for 2021 so it was a pleasant surprise to be invited to write an article for the 2022 issue.

Trunk Bay was my first home. This is 

place where I learned to swim, body serf, and fish off the rocks with a handline.

This is probably explains why you can take the girl out of the islands, but you can't take the islands out of the girl. 

***

Tomorrow is Three Kings Day, a holiday celebrated with much gusto in Puerto Rico. 

My mother was one of those children who put straw and water under her bed for the camels 

only to wake in the morning to find presents.

Happy Three Kings Day to all!

***

Being Thankful

Today I'm thankful to be here and to have made another revolution around the sun.

There is SO much to thankful for, despite what the news says or what people complain about.

Now it's onward into 2022. Who knows what it will bring? More of the same? 

Something worse? Something better? 

Whatever comes, 

may we all be a calm during the hard times and joyful during the easy times. 

I pass on this Tibetan Buddhist prayer to one and all.

May you be at peace.

May your heart remain open.

May you awaken to the light of your own true nature.

May you be healed.

May you be a source of healing for all sentient beings.

Happy New Year Everyone!

IWSG, Memories, and Writing

Posting the First Wednesday of every month, the Insecure Writer's Support Group, is the brainchild of Alex Cavanaugh. YOU can sign up HERE to participate.

Every month a question will be posed that may prompt you to share advice, insight, a personal experience or story. Remember, the question is optional. You can write about anything that relates to your writing journey.

Let's give a warm welcome to our co-hosts:  Renee Scattergood, Sadira Stone, Jacqui Murray, Tamara Narayan, and LG Keltner!

This month's question is: Has your writing ever taken you by surprise? For example, a positive and belated response to a submission you'd forgotten about or an ending you never saw coming?

It's funny, strange, and serendipitous how this question applies to me. I've been in a writing slump for some time. These slumps have happened before and I don't fret over it, as I know no matter how long they last, I'll eventually find my way out of it.

Recently I've been posting pictures with a few lines about the history of my family on the island of St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands. I've been posting to my Facebook author page , St. John Travel and Life, and to Voices of St. John VI. The multitude of positive and up-lifting responses has been humbling, inspiring, and totally awesome!

These postings led the editor of a magazine - someone I've written for before - to ask me to write a story for her magazine. And not just one story, but perhaps several. And, I'll get paid for it, and handsomely too.

So, to continue in this general vein, I will post here a few of the pictures I've posted on Facebook.






My mother, Erva Claire Boulon, on a donkey at about age 14, 1931 at Trunk Bay, St. John.

My grandmother riding into Cruz Bay, St. John to pick up the mail. 1945. She ran a guest house at Trunk Bay from the late 1930s until World War II then picked up where she left off after the war ended.

My grandmother, Erva Hartwell Boulon on the upper porch of the Main House at Trunk Bay, early 1950s. She ran her guest house without electricity. Doctors, lawyers, and artists stayed there for the quietude and peace she provided.

Among her more well-known guests were the author John Dos Passos, Dr. Robert Oppenheimer and his wife Kitty, and the artist Otto Freid.

This is a postcard from the 1940s of the kitchen at Trunk Bay.

This is me at Trunk Bay, about 1957. I appear to sand skiing.

Being Thankful

Today I'm thankful for the memories and for the opportunity to share them.

What are you thankful for? Has your writing ever surprised you?

Trunk Bay - Guests

Although Grammy ran her guest house without electricity, it was not primitive. She had gas stoves and kerosene refrigerators. There was also running water (gravity feed) and toilets that flushed. However there were no hot water showers. This is picture of my cousin Eve in the pantry. You can see one of refrigerators on the left.

This is a picture of Grammy's office at the bottom of the stairs, the same stairs I saw her come down the night we arrived and I met her for the first time. You can read about it here.

This is the upper hallway at the top of the stairs. That wall is part of The Pullman, a small room perfect for one person.

This is Grammy on the main porch doing some mending.

What Grammy provided her guests, besides great food and good conversation, was privacy. Many of her guests were professionals, lawyers, doctors and the like. They were people who dealt with people year-round and what they wanted was a place where they could get away from the hustle and bustle. Trunk Bay was that place. No telephones. No radios. No noise except for what nature provided. It was a place where people could, for a while at least, disappear.

Among some of her more well known guests were: Karen Horney, psychiatrist. Dr. Robert J. Oppenheimer, physicist. John Dos Passos, author. Otto Fried, painter.

Many of her guests were regulars, they came every year at the same time. One of them was a gentleman named Don Braested (pronounced Bray-sted.) He was an older man, with silver hair, who always stayed in the Pullman. He taught my sister, Erva, how to play Canasta and Bolivia. But with me, Don was pleased to spend his afternoons playing Go Fish and War. I missed him when he had to return to the states and I looked forward to his return. Although Erva would play Fish and War with me, she didn't necessarily want to play every day. But Don would and did.

Below are two pictures he took. This is me on the main porch of the main house. The tile top table I'm sitting on is where Erva and I played Pick-Up-Sticks. I remember the young skinny man in the background. He used to play Clue with Erva and other guests. I wanted to play Clue, but I didn't have a clue about how to play. And look at all those books!

The same day the above picture was taken, Don took the one below of me and Erva. It is my all time favorite picture of us. You see, Erva was twelve, going on thirteen. I was eight, going on nine. Erva was experiencing a tremendous growing spirt. (She grew six inches in six months. People thought I was like five years old because I was so small next to her.) The problem is, she was in pain, she was anemic, she was tired, she was clumsy, she was no longer patient, plus she had reach puberty (something I didn't know ANYthing about.) With all of that going, Erva, who had always been my best friend, turned into an Alien Monster. The day this picture was taken, she did not want to do it. She was being ornery and didn't want to smile. So there it is, my wee hand has snuck across the gulf and I'm tickling the Alien Monster, who despite all efforts starts to laugh and it is just at that moment that Don snapped the camera.

Oh just look my satisfied, mischievous face. I am unafraid of the Alien Monster, I know how to make it laugh!

Trunk Bay - Thelma, Godfrey and the Main House

The guesthouse at Trunk Bay comfortably housed fifteen guests, more with a little stacking. All the rooms were named. The North Terrace had two bedrooms with a connecting bath, perfect for a family of four. The Chicago Room was the breeziest and held two. The Green Room, painted a pastel green, also accommodated two. The Pullman was a tiny space perfect for a single person. Just below the Main House was a small building called The Shoe Box. It had two rooms, each with their own bath for a total of four people.

In this picture (scanned from a book called St. John Backtime by Ruth Hull Low and Rafael Valls) you can see the Main House on the left with a clear view of the North Terrace rooms on the ground floor. The Shoe Box is the little building clinging to the edge of the cliff. On the beach is a store house, the first building built at Trunk Bay, around 1929.

This is a picture of my grandmother, Erva Boulon, with her niece Bobby on the North Terrace.

The Shoe Box.

Grammy cooked three meals a day without electricity and on Saturdays during the high winter season charter boats full of people from St. Thomas and Tortola came for her luncheon buffet (reservations were required.) She put on quite a spread which included (but was not limited to) fancy aspics, fish chowder, cold cuts, home made breads, jellies, and desserts.

Of course, she could not have done it all by herself. She had help. Two of the people who worked for her were Thelma and Godfrey.They were a black couple who lived in a building down on the beach in the coconut grove. I remember Godfrey as slender and fairly tall. Thelma was stout and large bosomed.

He helped with cleaning while she helped in the kitchen. Every morning Godfrey went to all the rooms, gathered up the kerosene lamps and brought them to a place next to the kitchen. He'd put on a large bib-apron before he began. Then he carefully trimmed the wicks, filled them with kerosene and cleaned the glass chimneys. Sometimes he'd let me help clean the chimneys. My hands were small and I could get up inside the narrow part. It wouldn't be long and my arms would be covered in soot. Sometimes I helped him pulled sheets off beds.

This is Godfrey washing dishes.

My favorite times with Thelma were spent cutting up vegetables in the kitchen, pictured below. Unfortunately I don't have a picture of her. She would set me up by the window on the left with a knife and green peppers or onions or carrots or papaya or mamie apple and there I'd sit on a stool pealing, slicing, chopping. The experience taught me how to wield a sharp knife. That's Eulalie on the left and Dali on the right. The two children are my cousins, Rafe (the taller one) and his sister Eve. That's Grammy's spice rack to the right of Eulalie and you can see a yummy home made loaf of bread sitting on the counter. (Looks like Rafe is eyeing it.)

At breakfast Grammy had a charcoal pot set up to the left of her chair. The coals were always at a perfect glow. Those who wanted toast put in their requests to her. She'd slice off a hunk of fresh bread, set on a cutting board to her right, and put it in a metal toaster that looked something like the one below.

Lightly crisp or charred black, your toast was always exactly what you ordered. There was nothing better that her warm bread slathered with seagrape jelly and washed down with a glass of fresh squeezed orange juice.

It's blurry, but this is me, my sister Erva and cousin Rafe on the stone wall outside the North Terrace. It must have been taken soon after we arrived. We are all so small and I look like I did when I was five.

We're all barefoot and squinting into the early morning sun.

I feel like I can almost remember when this picture was taken. I can feel the sun on my face, feel myself squirming. It looks like Erva has reached over to keep me from moving and that I've got my hand on her arm, trying to push it away.

More about Truck Bay next Monday.

Trunk Bay

Among my fondest and earliest memories of St. John are those of Trunk Bay.
Some say it is one of the ten most beautiful beaches in the world. Other's say it is the most photographed beach in the world. Imagine...sometimes I was the only person on the beach. One family story goes my mother's father gave my mother the cay for her twelfth birthday.

I learned to swim here, taking to the water like a fish. Don't I look confident, though? I remember that swimsuit, it was too big for me. The stripes were orange-red and white.


Or I could pretend I was skiing.

Something else I learned here was how to fish off the rocks with a hand line. The part I loved best was smashing a whelk and getting my fingers all gooey from threading the tender abdomen onto the hook.

Whelks are also good to eat. They live on the rocks where ocean and land meet. It was great fun to go whelking, scrambling over the rocks, barefooted, like a goat. To get the sand out of them we soaked them over night in fresh water. Then they were boiled after which they were easily pulled from the shell with a something pointy, like a nut pick, small knife or even a nail. After that the abdomen was pinched off and the soft mahogany colored operculum was pulled away. Then came the best part, dipping the "foot" in my grandmother's wonderful dipping sauce. They were a great hors d'œuvre.

The first fish I can remember catching were a doctorfish

and a squirrel fish.

I proudly carried them up the hill to the main house where I was taught how to clean them by Thelma. More about Thelma and her man Godfrey next Monday.

(Happy Birthday to Scott McKenzie.)

Arrival

This is an updated/edited post from 2007.

December 20th, 1955, marks the day we arrived in the Virgin Islands. I was five years old. We had journeyed all the way from California on a freighter called the Pasadena. (Pictured here.) The three week trip took us down the West Coast, through the Panama Canal and into the Caribbean.

It was growing dark as we came into the harbor of Charlotte Amalia. Christmas lights twinkled around the harbor and hills. They were colored jewels reflected in the calm waters of the bay.

At the dock we were met by uncle Ralf, my mother’s younger brother. As we waited for our personal luggage to be unloaded, we went to a small palm thatched bar at Yacht Haven. I had my first Virgin Island coke (there used to be a bottling plant on St. Thomas) but it was too sweet for my liking and I think that’s why I have never been much of a soda drinker.

When we finally got our luggage we piled into a Willy’s station wagon and drove over dark, steep, winding roads from Charlotte Amalia to Red Hook on the far east end of the island.

From there we got onto a 20 foot launch and traveled three miles across Pillsbury sound to the island of St. John.The night was clear and dark. The Milky Way was a silver sash across the sky. My father directed my attention to the wake of the boat. There, to my amazement and delight, were more stars! Dad explained about phosphorescence. But I knew better. I knew the lights in the water were shooting stars that had fallen into the sea. I couldn’t decide which was more beautiful, the diamond studded sky or an ocean full of stars.

At the Creek, in Cruz Bay, we got into a jeep and drove over steep, rough, dirt roads. In some places four wheel drive was needed to traverse the rutted trail.

By the time we got at Trunk Bay it was close to mid-night. Grammy, my mother's mother, had left instructions that she be awakened when we arrived.We waited in the foyer at the bottom of the stairs. A single kerosene lamp pushed back the darkness. Outside coquis, geckos and crickets sang. Palm trees rustled in the breeze. And behind it all was the low ever-present melody of the ocean.

I had never been to Trunk Bay, never met my grandmother, yet everything seemed very familiar. I had seen, heard and smelled it all before. I recognized the small table in the corner, knew where the door on my left went. I had a wonderful feeling of coming home. I didn’t realize it at the time, but it was my first deja vu.

Then, from the top of the darkened stairs, Grammy appeared. She carried a glass lamp in her left hand. Her right hand rested on the banister. She was wearing a long white night gown. Her waist-length silver-white hair lay in a long braid over her left shoulder.

The soft light from the lamp she carried enveloped her like a halo. As I watched her come down the stairs I knew I was seeing an angel descending from heaven.

“Is this my grandmother?” I thought. “Do I have an angel for a grandmother?”

Suddenly she was among us, turned into a human being. She showed us to our rooms and put us to bed.

In the morning I awoke to the sounds of thrushies whistling, banaquits chirping and mourning doves cooing. And there behind it all was the low ever-present melody of the ocean.

I got up and went outside. Out of the darkness a miraculous view had appeared. An ocean was spread at my feet containing more colors of blue than I knew possible. Islands of different sizes and shades of green floated on the waves. Above me great towering clouds of white and gray and lavender hung in a azure sky.

I knew in that moment I belonged, that I was home.

All my life I have remembered that night and the following morning as clearly as is if happened yesterday. My grandmother turned out to be a wonderfully warm and loving human being. But in my little girl’s heart she remains my fairy god-mother, my guarding angel, a star come down to earth to help light my way.


The 20th of December was a gift. It became a family anniversary of our homecoming. It became the day we put up our Christmas tree and marked the beginning of our Christmas holidays.

I wish you all a Merry Christmas and hope you make many wonderful Christmas memories.

And here's one way to make a memory. Between 11:55 PM tonight and 2:53 AM (CST) we have the opportunity of seeing a winter solstice total lunar eclipse. The last time this happened was like 400 years ago. Get your kids up, make hot chocolate and go watch it. I hope it's clear where you are.

Grammy

My mother's mother was born on this day in 1895, in Ada, Ohio. Her name was Erva Love Hartwell. The middle name of Love was dropped when she got married, at which point she became known as Erva Hartwell Boulon.

At around the age of two or three, she was chosen to be the face for Mellin's Food, a brand of baby food. This is the original ad, not a copy.

Here she is with her dolls when she was about six or seven.

At around nine or so, she and her family moved to Key West, Florida because her father, Frank Hartwell, was a weatherman for the newly formed Federal Weather Bureau. The Bureau now bares the name of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Below is Erva Love in Key West.

In 1909 Frank Hartwell was transfered to the weather station in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico. Erva Love was about 14. She graduated from Central High School in San Jaun. This beautiful building is now an art school.

Erva Love Hartwell at 19.

She was fun-loving.

This is my favorite picture of her. Imagine how long her hair was when it was unbraided! I don't know how old she was when it was taken, but I estimate somewhere between 18 and 20.

She married Paul Alfred Boulon in Puerto Rico and had four children, my mother being the oldest.

In 1928 they bought Trunk Bay on St. John. In the years that followed the family build a summer home there. I'm not sure if that's her in this picture or our dear family friend Charlotte.

After World War II Grammy ran Trunk Bay as a guest house. She did it without electricity, cooking three meals a day for her guests. John Dos Passos, Dr. Robert Oppenheimer and his wife were among some of her more well-known guests. She gained the reputation for being a superior hostess and an excellent cook. Using local foods, she learned how to prepare them in ways that would please American taste buds. An article was written about her in the cooking section of the New York Times and she wrote a cook-book call My Island Kitchen. I loved having breakfast at her table because she would toast your bread on a charcoal pot set on a small table next to her chair. Below is a postcard of her kitchen.

Here she is on horse-back about 1945 going into Cruz Bay to pick up the mail. There were no vehicles on the island at that time. Everyone rode or walked.

Grammy had a wonderfully loud, uninhibited cackling laugh. Her hair turned silver by the time she was in her forties. She wore it a single braid on the top of her head and dressed up her do with hibiscus. She liked large, avant-garde jewelry. She was a pioneer.

She died on December 27, 1972. We all still miss her.

Among those who share a birthday with her: Henry V, king of England. William Wilkie Collins, writer. Jose Ferrer, actor. Bill Graham, rock promoter (Fillmores East and West who stayed at our guest house at Lille Maho.) Elvis Presley and David Bowie.

Remembrances of Gifft Hill - Back Story

Having a concrete floor AND cistern was quite the luxury item. The little wooden houses most everyone lived in had hard packed dirt floors or wooden ones. Few people had actual cisterns. They collected their rain water as the Thomas’s did, in 55 gallon drums. During dry spells there were catchments, in somewhat central locations, that collected water into large cisterns. People would go to the catchments to get water if they ran out. (More on that another time.) So, for the little house up at Gifft Hill to have both, was quite remarkable.

In 1927 my grandfather Alfred Boulon, my mother's father, bought Trunk Bay. His idea was to build a summer home and use it as a retreat, a place the Boulon family could go to get away from the hustle and bustle of Puerto Rico.

The original single room of The Castle was probably built in the early 1920’s. In 1928 there was a big hurricane and it was then the building was carried off its foundation and deposited across the yard.

By 1929 my grandfather was building a concrete storage/camp building and a cistern on the beach at Trunk Bay. This building would serve as the family’s living quarters until they got the main house build. All the materials to build it had to be brought in by boat. One of the people Grandpa B. hired to help with the concrete work was a man named Samuel Powel.

In this picture you can see the large Main House on the hill to the left. Below it is a little building we called the Shoe Box. And on the beach you can see the concrete building that served as the family’s temporary home while the Main House was being built.

And here's a picture of the actual building. See that flag? I have it.

We don’t know what arrangement was made, but Mr. Powel got the sand and cement from Trunk Bay. Load by load, the supplies were hauled all the way to Gifft Hill, a journey of three, maybe three and half miles, over steep winding trails. One must realize hauling bags of cement and sand all the way to Gifft Hill was done by donkey. There were no roads or cars on the island back then. Each 100 pound bag of cement was probably divided in half and placed into dumb-boxes that were carried by a donkey, as was every last grain of sand.

So it was that between 1929 and 1932, Samuel Powel hand mixed and hand poured the floor and 600 gallon cistern up at Gifft Hill. Some 25 years later, my parents bought the land and the little house from…(all together now) Samuel Powel. It was kind of like coming full circle.

Charlotte...and Gus Too

Charlotte Dean Stark. She was my first best friend (after my sister that is.)

Charlotte was older than my grandmother by 5 or 6 years. She had been a Suffragette. She was a book reviewer for the New York Times. Between December 4th, 1932 and August 6th, 1944, Charlotte wrote a total of 192 columns.

She was married to Gus, a thin man who had no teeth. But that didn't stop him from eating whatever he wanted. He ate everything from popcorn to steak, gumming things to death. On New Years Eve he'd put in his teeth and look completely different. But he didn't like to wear them because they hurt.

I don't know how Gus and Charlotte first learned about St. John or when they first arrived. I do know they were already family friends when my mother was going to Pratt Institute between 1934-36 because Mom spent the holidays with them up in Connecticut.

They came to Trunk Bay on St. John early on, before 1934, before Grammy opened it as guest house. In fact, the only building left at Trunk Bay, the Lower House, was built by Charlotte and Gus between 1948-49.

Charlotte had short curly graying red-brown hair. In her youth it had been a deep auburn. Her eyes, if I remember rightly, were a watery blue-green. She wore long skirts and dresses, which she made, to cover her right knee which had been severely mangled when she was a girl.

The story she told is that while riding a bike the front wheel hit a trolley or train track. She was thrown, landing on her right knee. The knee cap was shattered and a large cut on the top of her thigh caused a piece of her stocking to go up inside her her leg. Doctors had to enlarge the cut and with a long pair of tweezers they pulled the piece of fabric out. Her knee remained gnarly and lumpy and it didn't bend very well.

Over the fireplace (the only one on St. John at the time) there was an oil painting of her that was done when she was about 18. She had been a pretty young woman; a small heart-shaped face was surrounded by an abundance of auburn hair. She was wearing a long yellow dress. She looked very much the Gibson Girl.

She still had the dress when I entered her life. She'd let me play dress-up in it. It was made of satin and had a drapery-like front, like a narrow shawl that acted as both yoke and straps. It had a small train. When I wore it I loved pretending I was in a grand ballroom strolling and dancing about. Made me feel very elegant.

Charlotte was slender and had long fingered hands that were bony. She filed her nails into small points. She played the piano and sang in a thin watery voice. My sister, Erva, Charlotte and I liked to sing Christmas carols all year long.

She liked to do acrostics. She also had a knitting project, making herself an outfit of fine off-white wool. But like Penelope, she never finished it.

She took a battery of pills, mostly vitamins. She had these little pill boxes, each one different. Every morning she'd sort out which pills went into which box; morning, noon, evening, bedtime. She hated taking pills. She'd chew up the ones she could, all together (YUK!) Then all the gel-cap types she'd pop in her mouth, take a big sip of water, throw her head back, shake and wiggle her head and stroke her throat to get the pills down.

She made her own yogurt.

If I was around when she made bread she always gave me a small lump to knead. Even if it fell on the floor she'd bake it in its own little pan and I would eat it. She taught me how to use their special pop-corn popper. It was a large electric machine. Just this much oil, this much corn. I got so good I became the official popper when ever I visited, which was often.

Charlotte wrote two books about St. John. I wish I had them.

She slept in the nude and walked from the bedroom to the bathroom butt naked. She was not the least bit modest about her aging, saggy body. She slept with dozens of very small pillows which she made special pillow cases for. She also wore a black satin mask over her eyes as she couldn't sleep when there was any kind of light. She made the masks too.

She wore Joy perfume. Gus kept her supplied with an extremely large bottle of it. One bottle would last a couple of years.

Charlotte introduced my sister, Erva and me, to the "Sea Sick Record," (as our cousin Frances called it.) It's real name is "The Pinafore" by Gilbert and Sullivan. We loved that album and would sing along with it. I particularly liked trying to imitate the contralto who sang the part of Buttercup.

"I'm called little Buttercup,

Poor little Buttercup,

Though I could never tell why...

...So buy off your Buttercup, buy." It must have been a hoot to hear an 8 or 10 year old singing that song.

Charlotte and I got along like two peas in a pod. I spent many week-ends with her.

Gus would take us down to Hawksnest in the afternoons around 3 p.m. to take a sea bath. He had an old tractor and he'd rigged up a seat on the back of it. I would sit in Charlotte's lap as we made our slow way down the steep rocky road to the beach. We always had stale bread on hand to feed the pompanos.

After the beach Charlotte and I took a shower together, something that by today's standards would be frowned upon and/or questioned. One time I asked her why one breast was smaller than the other. She told me she had had a tumor removed and lifted up her breast so I could see the thin white scar that went from one side to the other. Another time I asked her why she and Gus didn't have kids. She told me she had lost three. I can only assume, now as an adult, that she had had three miscarriages. I told her I was sorry. She told me it didn't bother her anymore, particularly since she had me to play with.

Sunday mornings were always fun. Charlotte and I would get all dressed up. I would wear one her long dresses, all pinned and gathered up to fit me. We'd dab on some Joy, then we'd climb onto the tractor and Gus would motor the three of us down to Caneel Bay to pick up the Sunday New York Times. We must have been quite a sight, an old owman and little girl walking through the lobby of the hotel as if we owned the placed; Charlotte looking elegant - she carried herself as one who had once been among the elite, which she had been - and me, trailing skirts that were too long acting like a princess.

Then there was Gus, who wore the same basic outfit every day, jeans and a white short-sleeved shirt, leading this odd female pair.

Every morning Charlotte took her flower basket and shears and went out into the yard to gather hibiscus blossoms. She had a multitude of different kinds. Inside the house Gus had mounted on the walls lovely pieces of drift wood into which he had drilled holes. Charlotte would take out yesterdays wilted blossoms and replace them with today's. And so, there were these wonderful splashes of color in the foyer and on the white walls of the living room. A praticularly beautiful piece of free-standing drift wood sat on the top of her white up-right piano.

Once Charlotte taped/attached all these differnt types of hibiscus to one of her large potted plants. She called her "Ho-ax Charlotta."

Sometimes we had screaming contests to see who could scream the loudest. She and my mother called me "one of God's screachers" because I could scream so loud.

She liked to eat pomegranates and had several trees in the yard, both the white and ruby red kind.

In the late 1960's after Gus's death, Charlotte moved back to the states. I was very sad about the move. I begged her to sell the house to my Mom and Dad, but it was not to be. In 1989, Hurricane Hugo took the roof and destroyed part of the house. What was left was eventually torn down...all of the beautiful stonework Gus had done, their large open porch overlooking Hawksnest. It's all gone now.

But I have some pictures. This one shows me on her lap. My sister stands tall in the back. Our friends, Melaine, Ed (left) and John (right) gluster around her like bees on a flower. I am, as I always was, barefoot.

I loved Charlotte dearly. She always answered my questions, even if it was to say, "I don't know." I have a pretty little three-shelved cherry wood piece that was hers. I also have her Harebell china. Between us, Erva and I have several pieces of her jewerly. I also have two of her painted fans and several books from her extensive library. I read the The Secret Garden at her house.

In 1968 I visited family in Connectcut for Christmas. I spent the night with Charlotte in New York City. She was living in a hotel-apartment. We had dinner together. The next morning, before light, she gave me instructions on how to get to Grand Central Station. We hugged and said good-bye.

It was the last time I saw her. Charlotte died in 1977.

I still miss her from time to time, which is why I'm writing about her today. It's one of those moments.