It’s been eight months since I left the Northwest for this delicious remote island, about 2500 miles away from my favorite T.J. Maxx …  When we can, we’re out of the house by about 7:30 AM, and about half an hour later, Bill is snorkeling and free diving, and I’m on my back doing the inverted breast stroke or treading across the sand to my favorite hotel. l know their two macaws pretty well, and I like to sneak a long peek at the indoor koi and catch up on my monthly horoscope.  On my way,  I run into familiar beach pedestrians who tell me about their plans for next...

Her thick, dazzling dark braid rests on her back, while she bends over her homework sheet, and after a brief thinking spell, sets her pencil back on task.  I watch her write a number in the right column, after she tests it out on me first. “14?” “Exactly right,” I spring back. I smile at her success and even share a piece of her victory. It’s so nice, I comment, while she plants her 4 in the ones column, that there’s a right answer … a perfect solution that works.  She pencils a small 1 on top of the next column and politely nods at my non-digital...

Before I get to our lemons — those nice juicy seedless fuits that wait for our tug … and not the kind that I pick up with gardening gloves after they drop on the ground and splatter — just  a little about blushing mangoes.  And how on the mainland, I gasped at their price and foolishly left them alone… It was my dear pal Yinan, who showed me just what a mango can do.  A while ago, (too long, as far as I’m concerned), I sat close to one of her big bowls, while she expertly sliced a mango and detailed her salad.  Yinan’s salad, like the rest of dinner, not to...

Ed told me that he hardly ever gets a call from men after they lose their wedding bands — no, it’s their wives, he said, who track him down to see if there’s any way he can turn the beach upside down to bring the lost ring back.  I stopped asking questions for a moment and then the friendly carpenter, who lets his ladder idle as often as possible to search for a needle in a “wet haystack,” asked me how many men I knew who are willing to drive to a gas station for directions after they made the wrong turn?  And, yes, he’d helped several wives surprise their spouses...

“Grattis” to Alice Munro for winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, this year!  I once met a Nobel Prize-winning economist, during an awful winter snow storm. He was the patriarch of our next door neighbor’s family —  when we were mainlanders — and his 18 year old grand-daughter truly deserved a medal, too, for her exceptional kindness and  generosity, when she plodded through the snow and gave us the keys to her snow-ready car, so we could plow through the messy streets and refill our refrigerator.  Emily’s grandfather, Daniel McFadden, won the Nobel Prize in...