St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands
When I was 8, we moved to the island of St.
Croix, in the Virgin Islands. Our house was on a hill overlooking
Teague Bay and the St. Croix Yacht Club, and our front yard went down
to the beach. (Our house is the U-shaped one in the middle of the
picture where the bay dips in the farthest.)
This was obviously before the days of mini
vans. You should have seen the lot of us driving to church in this
little Mini Moke on a rainy Sunday morning!
Our house on Teague Bay was quite unique;
five bedrooms, five bathrooms, all wrapped around a courtyard. All
the "walls" entering into the courtyard from the house were made up
of banks of louvered doors, so that the whole house could open onto
the garden.
A mango and lime tree grew in the courtyard
along with papayas and poinsettias. The entire north side and half of
the east side of the house was floor-to-ceiling windows, looking out
over the bay toward Buck Island.
This picture was taken from our dining
room.
One of the most entertaining (and, looking
back, really stupid!) things we liked to do is to go out to "Grassy
Point" on the south east shore when storms blew up during hurricane
season and cling to the rocks while the pounding waves washed over
us!
Yes, we roamed around barefoot whenever we
weren't in school, and often lived in our bathing suits, but we did
at least get haircuts occasionally.
Yes, I was a ham at times... But I loved that
balcony. I don't know if it was because of the tradewinds, or the
nights I would sit there under the starlit sky and listen to the
sweet, rhythmic clanging of the halyards on the boats in the bay.
Or maybe the breakfasts on New Years' morning
after we'd been the first people under the American flag to see the
sunrise for the new year (out on the rocky eastern end of the
island.)
(I was 10 in this picture.)