With less than 25 days left in our island gig, I’m already dreaming about how we will do this again in the future. Every caretaking gig we take has been unique and we’ve loved all of them (except for maybe one), but this one, this one is really making me gush.
I do understand that we are here on this rock during the best months.
Number one, fall in New England. Guys, this island has been on fire! Particularly on the middle of the island, waves of scarlet are punctuated by gold and amber. (See what I did there?) And the weather has been unseasonably beautiful to boot.
Also, we are alone on the island, but never for too long. Islanders often come on the weekends. Isolation can do crazy things to people, but there’s no evidence of “Here’s Johnny” Shining episodes for us. Instead, we have the occasional weekend happy hour and delivery of food. Yes, we are still happy recipients of food donations, including leftover Halloween candy. I assure you we have more tortilla chips than a grocery store.
Speaking of food, we are still doing great on our provisions. Between the generosity of islanders, the fruitfulness of the island (apples! grapes! lobsters!) and our resourcefulness, it’s not too early to say we achieved our goal of buying 2 months of groceries and surviving. Don’t worry, we still have at least half of our 5 lb bag of carrots (freshness is becoming questionable).
We did have another great storm. I suppose, fortunately, we haven’t seen any overwhelming forces of nature, but I love the sound of howling northeast wind (that can change to southwest in an instant), the slapping of the turbulent dumping surf and the deluges. The tidemark came dangerously close to the shoreline and it was so mesmorizing to watch.
We’ve also seen days of glass out in the ocean. The calmness brings a lot of activity out on the seas. We’ve seen a tugboat trailing a house, a jet skier, a kayaker and a cruise ship, all in the last 2 weeks. Oh, and fireworks on shore.
We are not even close to being bored. Case in point, we rarely switch up our daily counterclockwise walk of the island. Same same, everyday.
Mostly, we keep very busy with our personal projects—a major job application (20+ pages), presentation planning and writing projects (me). When we need some excitement, we look for island projects. For example, scraping barnacles. Check out the below and after photos. Amazing stuff. FYI, barnacles might as well be concrete. I say this as if I have tried scraping any barnacles. But I leave most of the manual labor projects to J!
Labels: Caretaking
