Read Home by Another Way for Free Online Page B

circling round and round, from scribbling round to sunset round, day after day, season after season, year after year.
    I do not know the name of what it is that I will finally come to see. Home may be as good a name as any.

Four
    Invent your world.
Surround yourself with people,
color, sounds, and work
that nourish you.
    —S ARK
    O nce we arrive on St. Cecilia, we have only two appointments to keep. The second one, we try not to think about. It is the appointment with the boat that will take us off the island and start us on our journey toward the north and the cold, toward the gray and the brown. Toward the off-season, we baseball people would say.
    The first appointment is the one we look forward to—it is with Victor, the car-hire man. We are not actually hiring Victor; we are hiring a car from him. Which is the same thing as renting a car from him, only if we do not say “car hire,” no one knows what we are talking about here. We do not really hire a car either. We hire one of those small Japanese Jeep things with four-wheel drive and a good bit of space for piling groceries in the back and a convertible top that folds down into the boot. It has windows that zip out and invariably do not zip back all the way into place until after we turn inthe car at the end of our stay. Zipping the windows back in properly is not one of my gifts, nor is it a skill I have yet acquired.
    The appointment with Victor is important, because we need the Jeep for going to the market a few times while we are here. And we need it so that we can go to dinner on the days that we decide to tear ourselves away from Seastone. Though, to be sure, we could call a taxi in either case, and someone would be glad to pick us up and drive us around. By my unscientific survey, there are three taxis per tourist on St. Cecilia.
    The real reason that we set the appointment with Victor is that, unless we do, we cannot go riding around.
    Sara is from a small town in Mississippi. She claims that most of the Sunday afternoons when she was growing up were spent in the backseat of a car wandering through the back roads of the Delta. Sunday mornings were for church, and Sunday evenings too. Sunday afternoons were for driving through the countryside, through the farms and villages and fields that her parents had been raised in and on and around.
    After lunch on Sunday, her father would say to her mother, “What would you like to do this afternoon?”
    “Let’s just go ridin’ around,” would be the reply. And they would fill the backseat with kids, and off they would go.
    I never got to ride around with LeRoy, but I did get to go with Mozelle one afternoon before she passed away. She was right; it was a fine way to spend an afternoon.
    We think riding around is a fine way to spend an afternoon on St. Cecilia as well. So we make an appointment with Victor for the first morning we are there.

    Victor is not always on time for our appointment. That is not quite true, now that I think of it. Victor operates on island time, which generally means that whenever Victor shows up is the actual time that had been set, no matter what time had actually been set.
    He pulls up about fifteen minutes after I have calledto see if he is on the way. It is a telephone call I hate to make because it reveals that I am not yet living on island time and that my stateside impatience is still with me. “Still twitching like a live wire,” is the way James Taylor once referred to it in a song about a trip he made down this way once.
    When I do finally succumb and make the call, someone assures me that Victor has just left. Which likely means that the person who answered the call will now go and find Victor and tell him that we called. Which is his signal to go and figure out which car he will rent to us and see if it is running today and then drive across the island to where we are.
    He honks cheerfully as he drives up the hill and then comes breezing in and lays out his papers and keys