The school I attended in Calabash Bay on Andros Island in the Bahamas has long since morphed into a fundamentalist church, and the kiwi trees we kids used to sit under for lessons have been backhoed away. Still, the core interior is mostly unchanged, and it's easy to see past the altar to the principal's desk which hulked in middle of the room, punishment strap coiling like a cobra. Grades 1-6 attended here, with no walls between the classrooms. It was all so new for me, a Canadian kid used to snowpeople and sleds and toboggans. We sat on benches and pulled slates thumbtacked to the backs of the benches in front towards us to work our sums; grade four kids had to spell the word "epidermis" which I believed was hopelessly grown up and wonderful. When we sat outside for lessons while yellow chicks pecked the rocks around us, I thought I would expire from delight. It was a time of firsts for me-first sight of the ocean, first choking taste of salt water, first scary hammerhead shark prowling the bow of our rowboat, first sea turtle swimming like a green mirage, first three-speed bike manoeuvered barefoot, first time having my mother all to myself. First kiss, in fact, in the dark on the beach at Small Hope Bay Lodge. The boy, I learn, is now a lawyer in Nassau.
I find my old friend Margo Birch Blackwell again, and the disappointments no longer matter-not the incessant wind, the curtailed dives, or the fact that the Games Room doesn't bring back the deja vu of yesteryear. I adolized Margo when I was a girl, and I find she's grown into a kick-ass woman currently running the Bahamas Environmental Research Center on Andros.
I'm lucky enough to shoot an island legend named Miz Ophelia Marshall up in the island's northern community of Red Bays. She has goiters the size of one of the sponges the fishers pull out of sea corrals. She is 89 on Christmas Eve-born when the last century was new, in 1917. She used to be the community's midwife, but now she makes baskets, some woven so tightly they'll hold water.
We shoot pans in the pine forests, lovely blurred landscapes, and more photos at the Androsia factory where the renowed batik fabrics, the soft blues and pinks and yellows, are fabricated.
On the last morning, quietly, out past the sunbathing solarium, we shake my mother's ashes into her beloved Carribean Sea and watch, tears streaming down our faces, as she joins the green blue waves forever.
Posts
