The Haven of Mountain Haven
Every time I sat on the porch time seemed to stop. The
calm stillness set me to island time, and nothing else seemed to be relevant. My
family was in the US Virgin Islands, and we had rented a tiny cottage at the
top of an incredibly steep hill. The drive up was tedious and nerve racking,
but the house itself, Mountain Haven, was a gem well worth it. We spent quite a
bit of time sitting on the wrap around porch, painted a mixture of teal and sky
blue and decked out with dated patio furniture. There was a long wooden table
that served as our breakfast nook and an old fashioned lantern that didn’t do
much good since it attracted bugs at night. The awning above the porch was
strung with out of season Christmas lights. The porch itself didn’t seem like
much. That is, until you waited for a while.
We were not the only inhabitants of the secluded
space. The owners who rented the cottage to us were big fans of animals; they
had found a stray cat and decided that it needed a home. They decided its home
would be on the porch of their vacation rental. There was a cat box on the far
end of the boards, where a small black cat would sit and meow at us. He would
come and go, sometimes hiding from us and sometimes trying to eat food out of
our laps. My sister and I decided to call him Coral Bay, named for the bay at
the foot of the hill. There was also a small dish full of turbinado sugar on
the corner of the railing; next to it was a Tupperware full of water. If you
stayed still, exotic song birds would come to eat sugar and wash themselves. It
was a treat to hear their soft pecking and the trickles of water they flicked
onto themselves with their beaks. Every
so often some not-so-exotic animals would wander onto our porch. As the owners
told us, the island was having a bit of a problem with chickens. When we looked
over the side of the railing, we saw that they were right. There were twenty or
so chickens milling about beneath us. They rustled through the leaves and made
quite a ruckus; one rooster in particular seemed to carry on regardless of what
time of day it was. Some of the more adventurous chickens would come up onto
the porch with us. We tried to shoe them away, but they were quite persistent.
We did our best to coexist with our noisy feathered neighbors. Little lizards
would join us as well, scurrying up the walls and basking in the sunlight.
We did our fair share of basking in the sunlight too.
The warm island air greeted us every morning, with a slight breeze that
whistled through the wind chimes. The air wafted up scents of the sea water
below and the flowering trees planted around the property. It made me feel
weightless, like I was drifting up the mountainside along with it. Still, all
other things aside, the best part of the porch was the view.
We were well above sea level, and situated in such a
way that we looked right out over the bay where sailboats would dock for the
night. You could see for miles. The bulk of the island, St. John, was on our
left, while the tail end jutted out to sea at our right. At the foot of the
hill was Coral Bay, and beyond the bay you could see the British island of
Tortola in the distance. The water was an impeccably clear blue, which got
progressively darker as it got deeper. One could get lost in the beauty.
It would have been easy to spend the entire vacation
sitting on that porch, letting the island ebb and flow around you: the scent of
the sea, the warm breeze, the pattering feet of chickens and lizards and Coral
Bay the cat. Mountain Haven’s porch was a vacation of its own, and it is a spot
I would readily revisit.
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