The Best Kind of Day

Three more fascinating and illuminating days in Jamaica - all of the research goals I came with have been accomplished through warm, welcoming encounters with potters I met fifteen years ago, and through the generous contributions of time and effort from Jamaican colleagues. I'm headed home tomorrow with a full notebook to transcribe, great pictures and videos, and wonderful memories.

Fern Gully - image courtesy of Google, you better bet I did NOT take my hands off the wheel or my eyes off the road

On Monday morning I followed David Pinto's truly excellent directions all the way from Falmouth across the northern coast to Ocho Rios, through the wild bends and dense jungle of Fern Gully (another absolutely verge-free nowhere to hide road with souvenir vendors and mad drivers) down across the middle of the island and along and over Rio Cobre to Spanish Town and the home of Merline Roden, known by her childhood pet name as 'Munchie' to pretty much everyone. We had such a lovely visit - I met her on my trip here in 1998, and started our conversation with the story of how she had engineered my meeting with now longtime friend Moira Vincentelli, the curator of the ceramics collection at the University of Aberystwyth in Wales. I had left Munchie with my card, and when Moira came through not long after on a research trip for her book Women Potters Transforming Traditions Munchie passed along my contact information, she got ahold of me and we have been friends and collaborators ever since.

Munchie, and her mother Lucy 'Ma Lou' Jones (who passed on in 1995) are very well known in Jamaican clay circles as the final practitioners of what was once a booming trade in domestic ceramics that crashed in the 1940s with the introduction of cheap aluminum and enamel cookware. Ma Lou gave it up for a few years, but found herself compelled to continue making her yabbas (cooking pots and bowls) and coal pots and water jars. She gave many demonstrations at home and abroad, and in 1984 she was awarded the National Honour of the Order of Distinction during the Jamaican Independence Anniversary celebrations. Today, her daughter lives and works in very humble circumstances, and yet she is one of the most joyful, friendly, and positive people I have ever met.

We spent three or so amazing hours together, with Munchie patiently demonstrating while I took pictures and shot video, and then she helped me make my way through constructing a pot using her African-based methods (I didn't do too badly, for which I thank my St. Lucian teachers). I showed her lots of images of Caribbean potters who work in a similar fashion, and gave her a picture of Irena Alphonse from St. Lucia who will be joining me in Jamaica next April. It is my fondest wish to watch them make pots together, and compare methods. Several members of Munchie's extended family joined us during the afternoon, and everyone was incredibly nice to me. 

Munchie has quite a few pots accumulated in her storeroom; it's expensive to get them to markets and there's a high likelihood of breakage when they are moved around. But she continues in her absolute commitment to making pots, and says that for her as for her mother, there is 'no other alternative' - not as an act of desperation, but as one of deep joy and powerful connection.

Both hers and her mother's pots are represented in heritage collections in Jamaica - in the National Gallery ceramics collection, at the African Caribbean Institute of Jamaica (where I saw and photographed Ma Lou's coalpot set below identified by the three small marks on the shoulder of the pot - this was Ma Lou's mark; Munchie uses four small dents), and in the collections of the Institute of Jamaica and its various museums. A marketing program for these pots is sorely needed, one that would emphasize the story of these wonderful women, and the historical contributions the yabbas and coalpots made to the growth of Jamaican society. Maybe one day.

 

After leaving Spanish Town I managed to find my way back to Kingston and the Indies Hotel thanks to  another set of great directions by Munchie's son Ian. Monday was a holiday - National Heroes Day - so happily the traffic was very light. On Tuesday, however, I was not so fortunate and managed to find myself attempting to navigate the wacky, unpredictable, one way streets of congested Kingston during BOTH rush hour periods - morning and night. Ah well. Don't worry Katie - somehow it all worked out. In the morning I bumbled my way downtown to meet up with ceramic artist, teacher, and amazing drummer Phillip Supersad (quite possibly the busiest man in Kingston as far as I can tell) who was kind enough to make room in his day to take me into Trenchtown to find my old acquaintances Blessed Reid and Junior Panton who make huge numbers of garden pots using the Nigerian-derived construction process called the 'walkaround style'.

There is a real divide for most people living in Kingston between the uptown and downtown areas, and Trenchtown is just not a place I can go without an escort. That being said, I was again welcomed incredibly warmly and with no reservations at all. I had brought pictures from fifteen years ago, and they were a huge hit - a bunch of us stood around in the street talking about the people in the images and how they had grown up, especially one lovely young woman who was one of two twin girls in a group picture. It was a delightful experience. 

Walking into the yards behind the fences on Ramsay Road took me right back and Blessed and Junior and I exchanged memories of the earlier visit while acknowledging that yes, we had all gotten a good bit older. Junior was working away as always so I happily hauled out the cameras and tried to solve the problem of shooting both still images and video. 

 

I'm really looking forward to building a companion website for the book; there's just no way to describe the walkaround style - you have to see it to believe it. Junior made the flower pot below in just about ten minutes. Yes, ten minutes, start to finish. I'm not kidding.

I could have stayed all day but Super needed to pick up a friend at the airport who unexpectedly arrived several hours early, so Blessed took us out to see where they gather their clay and fire their pots. This area is part of the huge Liguanea Plains in lower Kingston; the geological history of the place produced what is essentially miles and miles of earthenware clay, and this in an area that is constantly being developed so the clay is becoming increasing inaccessible (hard to dig clay when someone builds a house on top of it). This site is obviously still able to provide a seemingly inexhaustible supply, at least for now.

This is the current incarnation of the circular kiln they use to fire the pots (it's rebuilt every couple of years), with a raised grate of scrap steel in whatever forms they can get. The pots are stacked about twice as high as the walls, and shards and sheets of galvanized are used to close them in and hold the heat. The recently made pots are fired very very slowly for about eight hours, and then very very quickly with lots of wood for another hour or so. Oh how I wish I was going to be around for the next firing.....

After the pots cool, the various specially commissioned pots and local orders are sold and the remaining pots go off to various street side locations in upper Kingston, like the one where I saw them on Constant Spring Road last Saturday.

It really was a magical couple of hours, and Blessed told me I was welcome any time. Junior asked me to send down books with pictures of garden pots - they are always looking for new ideas, and I know just the book - The New Terra Cotta Gardener. So off I went with Super rattling through Kingston in his crazy van talking pots the whole way and he made sure I got where I was going before taking off. Fascinating man, I hope we have lots more ceramic adventures together in some future time. I spent the afternoon at the National Gallery and the Institute of Jamaica looking at shows, and then spent an hour and a half in Kingston traffic getting hopelessly lost about a hundred times until finally some very nice people at an ice cream stand told me how to get back to the hotel which totally worked except that the last half mile took about 30  bumper to bumper minutes which I really didn't mind because I actually knew where I was. Once back at the Indies Hotel a couple of nice cold Jamaican Red Stripe beers fixed me right up.

And today it was back to Spanish Town, this time the old city center which was once the capital of colonial Jamaica. The facades bear witness to a very imposing history but it would take an enormous investment to bring these crumbling buildings back to some version of their former glory. I was told that there has been a proposal to do just that and it would be really good because the folks in Spanish Town don't seem to have much to do and this could be an amazing destination for heritage tourism.

I couldn't resist this marvelous old house; I'm not sure anyone actually lives in it but the 'security fencing' has been enhanced, shall we say, with very contemporary elements courtesy of Red Bull and Arizona Iced Tea cans woven into the metal work.

I'd seen the Red Bull influence already at the Edna Manley College where they had brought in bar tables to better sell their noxious and hyper-caffeinated beverage so I wasn't all that surprised to find the cans in a fence in Spanish Town but its all pretty clear evidence of a marketing onslaught. Yuck.

Amyway, back to what I came to Spanishtown to do - the People's Museum of the Institute of Jamaica houses the kind of everyday historical tools for living that include traditional ceramics, and I was very very very fortunate to be able to meet up with Roderick Ebanks, retired now from the Jamaica National Trust and my teacher in 1999 for a course on Jamaican earthenwares at Port Royal. We had a fascinating conversation about the pots in the collection for a couple of hours - the bottom line is that despite the absolute omnipresence of functional ceramics throughout the history of the Caribbean there is almost nothing written about it, so conversations like this really help in exploring possibilities and connections in the ceramic record.

In talking with museum staff Tyrone Barnett at the People's Museum I learned that there was some critical paperwork I needed to fill out, get signed, and file with the Institute of Jamaica in order to use images of the collection in the book, so I needed to get back to Kingston in a hurry. For efficiency's sake Tyrone sent me off with my new best friend Ramon Downer (I told him to wave for the international blog audience) and he became my afternoon research assistant and saver of my sanity in Kingston traffic. 

We had a great time navigating back to Kingston, everyone at the Institute was very helpful, got the forms filled out and spent some time in their library, and then Ramon and I went off on an adventure to the Barbican area in north Kingston to try and find these little antique shops I had heard about about and while we didn't find them at all we did find Sidney Wilson, the Flower Pots Man on Barbican Road who I had missed when I drove through here last Saturday. He actually works down on Ramsay Road in Trenchtown right near the other potters I visited yesterday and he had already heard about me so introductions were not particularly necessary. We had a great chat, and then Ramon and I went off for Chinese food and navigated back to my hotel while magically avoiding all rush hour traffic. Amazing. 

These have all been the best kind of days - all the planned stuff was great and all the unplanned stuff was just as great and while I'm very ready to get on the plane to Miami tomorrow it has been a fantastic trip to Jamaica. I'm going to try and squish in a short visit to Port Royal in the morning before my flight - fascinating place, once the 'Wickedest City In The World' at the height of its pirate heyday in the late 1600s, but most of it fell into the sea in an apparently justified act of god earthquake on June 7, 1692. The British later built extensive fortifications there so its a cool place to see and right near the airport. Then its home for three days before taking off for Trinidad and the festival of Diwali !

Kitchen Bitches and Wicked Witches

I'm sitting here on Mylie McCallum's lovely porch that looks out across the rooftops to the wide expanse of sea here on the north coast of Jamaica, just west of Falmouth and about a half an hour from Montego Bay. After she retired from nursing, Mylie decided to set up a little bed and breakfast in  her home, and it's been a delightful place to say while I've been in the north. No pictures of food just now (but don't worry Katie - there's lots of pictures to come) but I've just inhaled a colorful bowl of banana, watermelon, and papaya and am waiting for the main event. Mylie cooks a great traditional Jamaican breakfast - yesterday it was ackee and salt fish and roasted breadfruit. Yahoo baby. Oh heck, here it is and its so beautiful I can't help myself - salt fish, callaloo, green bananas, and 'bammy' (crisp fried cassava bread). Gorgeous.

  

Alright so back to reporting on the trip - once again I am in awe that I've only been in Jamaica what - five days ??? The conference was fascinating, not just for the official stuff - papers, presentations, etc - but for meeting the students and faculty at the Edna Manley College who were both going about their usual business and also working with performance artists of various kinds.

This is Traci - she's a fourth year student in sculpture who is working towards her BFA thesis exhibition in June and was kind enough to invite me into her studio. She works with welded steel in combination with stretched nylon; fascinating juxtapositions of hard and soft, durable and fragile, and will be incorporating figurative references related to contemporary dance (there's a terrific dance program here as well as visual art). As with pretty much everyone I meet in the Caribbean Traci has an amazing family story, in this case her Chinese grandmother who was born in Jamaica but then suddenly sent to China at the age of five and did not return to Jamaica until she was in her fifties. I really hope I get to see her work again when I come back to Jamaica in April.

Jamaica is the only country in the English-speaking Caribbean with an art museum - the National Gallery of Jamaica. I went to an excellent panel discussion there about their current exhibition, titled 'New Roots' and displaying the work of ten young Jamaican artists, most of whom were connected to the Manley College in some way. I've been to the National Gallery several times before, but have never seen it like this - they turned over the main entry galleries to an eye-popping graffiti/pop art/interactive project, and the additional galleries highlighted video projects, photography, wearable sculptures, and several different approaches to drawings. Fascinating.

Back at the College I was fortunate to catch up with David Dunn and Norma Harrack, ceramic artists and faculty in the program, and I'm hoping to come back here for a few days in April to fire pots with them before the woodfiring workshop that is my primary purpose for that trip. 

The official business of the conference would up on Friday evening with a closing ceremony complete with lively drumming, and then you could choose between a dance or drama performance; I went to the dance it and was really great - 8 or so different dance pieces, highlighted by the amazing work of the Jamaican National Dance Theatre Company that Rex Nettleford founded. Awesome way to finish the conference.

Saturday morning I took a deep breath and went to the rental car company around the corner, checked out of my hotel, and took off to brave the Jamaican roads. On the way out of Kingston I was looking for a potter who sells along the Barbican Road; didn't find him but did find a young man selling garden pots on the Constant Spring Road so I stopped to chat.

 

And once again was blessed by the guardian angel of ceramic researchers - the photo on the right above is one I took in 1998 when I was able to document the 'walkaround style' potters in Trenchtown. I'm set up to go again on Tuesday but wasn't sure if I could find the same people. Well, the young boy on the in the photograph with Mrs. Pearl Richards in 98 turned out to be the same young man selling the pots on Constant Spring Road (and I did get him to smile eventually). We had a great conversation, I showed him all my pictures, and he's going to let folks know that I'll be there on Tuesday. Magic.

Nobody was kidding when they said that the road I was taking to visit Belva and Donald Johnson in Clonmel was...challenging. Very narrow, very twisty winding, no verge at all - cliff on one side, drop on the other. But no problem mon, I got there a bit late but got there fine and Belva and Donald were just wonderful. They trained with the celebrated Cecil Baugh (very long story, won't go into it, suffice to say that he was first trained by potters like the flower pot makers, went on to serve in WW2, worked with Bernard Leach in England, and founded both the contemporary ceramics movement in Jamaica and the ceramics program now at the Edna Manley College). The Johnsons have been making a living making pots for more than thirty years; I had met them briefly before but never visited the studio so it was a real treat to spend time there and hear their stories.

 

Donald is an amazing technician - he and Belva have built all their own kilns and equipment, and now make most of their work with slip casting from original models and molds. This level of efficiency allows them to fill large orders for hotels, gift shops, and local organizations, and they make a wide range of functional, decorative, and expressive forms. On the right are two examples of their version of the 'kitchen bitch', which is a traditional handheld kerosene lamp previously made out of tin or converted cans and used to light the way out to the kitchen house to start the cooking in the dark wee hours of the morning. Love the name - they sell these to the gift shop at the national Institute of Jamaica but I told them that they should make up a label to tell the story cause what American tourist wouldn't want to buy a pot called a 'kitchen bitch' ?!?!

I said my goodbyes to the Johnsons and made my way out of the country and up to the long north coast road which is dominated by the huge tourist complexes at Ocho Rios and Montego Bay; it took some doing to find my little guesthouse in the dark but after a few phone calls Roma drove down and led me back up the hill. Note to self and others - don't drive in the dark in Jamaica, for all kinds of reasons. But its really just fine in the day, and yesterday morning I had no trouble following David Pinto's excellent online directions up to his fabulous studio on the Good Hope Estate above Falmouth. I was here two years ago with my friend Tina Spiro, and will be coming back in April for the intensive woodfiring workshop that he does almost every year with Doug Casebeer from the Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Colorado.

David makes wonderful, wonderful pots and figurative sculpture, and I'm REALLY looking forward to coming back here to actually just work in the studio. Irena Alphonse from St. Lucia will be coming as well; should be a fascinating time. David and I spent several hours talking about ceramics and Jamaica and his own incredibly interesting family history, and I am so grateful for the time he and his wife and little son Oscar spent with me.

I rounded out the day with a visit to Rose Hall near Montego Bay, one of only fifteen plantation great houses out of 700 to survive the island wide destruction of the late slave rebellions. In fact, tho, because of its peculiar history it lay abandoned for 130 years until an American couple bought the limestone shell of the house and 5000 of the 6000 acres of the estate (much of which is now hotels and golf courses). They spent a fabulous amount of money restoring the great house to its former grandeur, complete with a full complement of period furnishings from the 18th and 19th centuries. But the reason the place survived at all is because of fear of the curse of the White Witch of Rose Hall, Annie Palmer, a 19 year old English-Irish 5' tall jezebel who married and murdered the owner, and went on to marry and murder two more husbands. All of this was apparently documented by her bookkeeper whose girlfriend she pushed off the second floor balcony to her death. But that girl's grandfather, a freed slave, then murdered Annie in her bed in retribution. Goodness. So there's lots of ghost stories and gloom and doom about the place; Johnny Cash had an estate down the road and he wrote a song about her - it's worth a listen, I heard a lovely rendition of it from my tour guide as we stood next to the tomb built for Annie by the Americans when her bones were discovered during the renovation of the property.

Oh dear - it's ten o'clock and I need to be in Spanish Town by 1:00 so off I go down the highways and byways of Jamaica. I'm going to see Marlene Roden - Munchie to everyone - who makes beautiful traditional pots like the one above from David Pinto's collection. More later !

   

On the Road Again in Jamaica

WOW but its been a very long, very full day at the 2013 Rex Nettleford Arts Conference on Sustainability, Social Transformation, and the Creative Industries at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts in Kingston, Jamaica (quite a mouthful, and quite a day). Let me see – today is um…Thursday; I left my house in Ft. Myers yesterday at 5:00am, drove to Miami, parked at the Airport Marriott (great deal - $4.50/day, free shuttle), was checked in by 8:00 and sitting down with my usual Cuban swiss cheese and tomato Miami Airport sandwich by 9:00, boarded the plane at 10:20 and landed in Jamaica two hours later. Eeeeeeeeasy. No problem with immigration or customs, headed out to the curb to find the taxi I booked with my hotel and …no taxi. There was a very handy Digicell office right there so I got yet another $5.00 sim card for my travel phone and called the hotel where apparently I had no reservation despite the ten or twelve emails we exchanged on the subject but no problem they had a room available and of course there was an airport cab very happy to drive me into Kingston. I had booked into the Indies Hotel because it appeared to be easy walking distance to the much more expensive Knutsford Court conference hotel where I could catch the daily shuttles up to the Manley College and that did in fact turn out to be true. I have a perfectly comfortable little room on the ground floor with three single beds, a safe in the closet for an extra US dollar a day and while the water temperatures in the shower are wildly variable the window AC works just fine and the restaurant has lots of vegetarian options (to cater to the Rastafarians, of course). I spent the afternoon and the evening yesterday cramming for my conference presentation, sorting out the rental car for Saturday, attending an opening dance performance, seeing some familiar faces, finding out that Monday is a national holiday so there goes some of the things I had planned to do, generally agonizing over everything and not sleeping much at all.

Today, however, was just great in every way. One of the speakers in the main panel was David Brown, the director of the African Caribbean Institute of Jamaica and the perfect person to enlist in my crusade to go back into Trenchtown to interview ‘walkaround style’ potters I met and photographed fifteen years ago. On the bus this morning I renewed my friendship with the amazing Marielle Barrow of Caribbean InTransit (terrific online journal and networking site for contemporary Caribbean art) and she knows David so he had been warned already when I descended on him after the panel but he couldn’t have been more supportive. After several phone calls and an introduction to Jamaican ceramics professor and incredible drummer Phillip Supersad we had a plan to meet up next Tuesday to head into Trenchtown with Phillip who knows these potters I’m trying to find. I love the Caribbean. There’s always a way to get where you’re going because people are just so great. I had a great chat too with David Dunn, also on the ceramics faculty, and he came to my talk as did several of his students and David Brown and Marielle Barrow and it went just fine – the images all looked great, and in my twenty minutes I managed to say some useful and interesting things (title of the presentation: “A Fragile Enterprise: Is There a Place for Tradition in the New Creative Economy ?”). The rest of the day kept going like that – met and listened to lots more fascinating people, ate some pretty good food in the campus cantine, made very reassuring phone calls to confirm my visits to potters on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. The day wrapped up with the opening ceremonies for the conference in the evening with fire-breathing acrobatic Jonkonnu dancers, a lovely performance by the Jamaican National Folk Singers, some interesting roots reggae/rap fusion music, and a quite good speech on the creative industries by a national politician who was both knowledgeable and personable (he had a great line about politicians as performers – and then amended that to ‘non-performers’.) All in all a worthwhile evening but by the time the last Jonkonnu dancer cartwheeled off the stage around 9pm I was nearly comatose from weariness and am now going to pass out altogether because tomorrow we start right up again at 8:30am. Jamaican pictures and thoughts on the writing of the book to follow soon…

Looking Back, Pressing Forward

Yikes - what a difference. I'm back ten days, suddenly it's September - eleven months now to manuscript delivery and obviously counting - and I'm finding it as difficult as I knew it would be to establish a consistent working routine at home. Travel in general and this trip in particular has/had an experiential pattern that I thrive on; goals and intentions and a rich and fascinating landscape to move through and on top of your plans there's always those amazing serendipitous encounters and events that sit like cherries on an ice cream sundae when all good gets even better. That being said by the end of the month I was really really ready to get home but the shift from all of that dazzling movement and input to sitting here on my porch with the computer is....different.

I spent my last day in Suriname working on the blog, intending to shop a bit more, and playing nature tourist. Those last two and a half days were of necessity partly sedentary, and yes, I'm going to tell you why because I do have one piece of valuable travel advice I'd like to pass along. On my final Monday in Paramaribo I tried to commit myself to a 'taxi-free' day - not that I really minded paying all those taxi drivers but I just wanted to see if I could do it. In the end I did take one $15 SRD taxi to try and see that dance performance that was cancelled when I got there and I got a free ride back so maybe that taxi doesn't really count but in any case I walked A LOT that day and I was carrying around my purchases of pottery and wood carvings and antique glass and and and so not only was it hot I was lifting weights all day. And did I make sure to eat regularly, and more important, drink lots of fluids ? No, I didn't and here's where the first part of the advice comes in. As previously reported, I had a full and rich day ending with the National Art Exhibition and that amazing meal after which I walked back to my hotel and headed straight into a much needed shower and discovered that I had a potentially quite serious health issue. As a result of earlier accidents and genetic vascular deficiencies my ankles are very susceptible to swelling, and I know from lots of experience that this is always aggravated by both heat and dehydration but what I didn't know was that this type of swelling can trigger a condition called cellulitis, which is essentially a staph infection of the skin that if untreated can move into your lymph system and put you in the hospital or even....well let's not go there. What i had to deal with was flaming red blotches from my feet to my knees that scared the bejesus out of me but thankfully I knew just what it was because my sister Katie has had a quite bad time with it and, of course, i had the internet. And no matter how frustrated my primary care physician gets with online self-diagnosis, Dr. Google was really helpful to me that night. Now here's the critical piece of advice - for all these years I have ALWAYS traveled with a broad spectrum antibiotic, usually ciprofloxacin but this time it was amoxycillin that my dentist had given me for potential tooth issues and as it turns out this was exactly what i needed for the cellulitis. After a predictably anxious night I could see by the morning that it was definitely working -  blotches not quite so red and starting to recede - and I would not, in fact, have to find a doctor or face a hospital stay in Suriname. Very happy about that. So I kept my feet elevated in the mornings as indicated while I wrote the blog, and took lots of taxis to get where I was going, and was very, very glad that my stupidity regarding sensible self-maintenance while traveling was offset by my intelligent advance planning.

So on that last day in Suriname I called a taxi to take me to Sana Budaya, the Indonesian Cultural Center that i knew i should have called first but i couldn't find a phone number and besides several days earlier a woman who really sounded like she knew what she was saying told me that 'it's a cultural center, it's always open'. I think you know what's coming and yes, that Wednesday it was all packed up following several days of Carifesta events so I had the taxi driver continue on to Leonsburg, the town where I would be meeting up with the dolphin sunset tour folks two hours hence. 'Town' is a rather ambitious word, however - there's a dock, a convenience store, a couple of small restaurants and a really big police station but that's most of it. Happily, I brought my book, the great brown spread of the Surinam River was very beautiful in its own way, and my $3.00 lunch of thick cassava fries, a little bit of chicken, and these gorgeous teeny weeny fried fishes with some kind of pepper sauce - delicious.

The Surinam River

Tour boats waiting for sunset

yum

The Sunset Dolphin Tour is Paramaribo's entry into the ecotourism business, supported by the Green Heritage Fund of Suriname and its European partners. A cousin to the ocean dolphin, this species (Sotalia guianensis) lives and feeds in the estuaries and rivers along the eastern coast of Central and South America, from Nicaragua to Brazil, and is distinguished by its smaller size (about 6' long) and the varying shades of pink that blush the underside of this lovely creature. At the end of the day they can be seen feeding at the confluence of the Suriname and Commewijne Rivers, and the tour boats weave slowly and carefully across the mangrove-lined river while the dolphins leap and play and eat and inevitably disappear just as you hit the shutter on your camera.

The 'village tour' that followed upriver was for me not so successful in that there did not seem to be any coordinated collaboration with the chosen site other than the construction of tourist toilets at the dock. This parrot, which clearly seemed to be attached to a family in the community, was quite comfortable with people, but the flea-bitten caged monkeys and a pervasive feeling of malaise left me eager to get back on the boat. We departed just in time to catch the sunset as we motored west towards Leonsburg; perhaps more impressive was the simultaneous rising of a huge orange-tinted full moon over the opposite bank of the river when we docked (photo efforts sadly unsuccessful).

That night (Wednesday August 21) sleep was a pretty fugitive effort; after a final packing/repacking cycle I set my alarm and notified the night guard for a 3:00am wake-up which turned out to be overly responsible on my part since the driver of the airport shuttle bus had decided on his own that my scheduled 3:30 departure was really much too early. After a few phone calls he came at 4:10, convinced that the flight was delayed so what was the rush and with all the additional pickups and the long drive we didn't get to the airport until 10 minutes before 6 and found ourselves at the very end of the checkin line for Dutch Antilles Express, which was showing every sign of a reasonably on-time 7:30ish departure. I got checked in at 6:30, then into the line for exit emigration, then security check, then straight to the gate so no time to exchange the SRDs and thankfully I had brought some food with me but if i had arrived any later it would have cost me a helluva lot more than the $40 or so that I absolutely could not exchange in either Curacao or Miami. So much for know-it-all airport shuttle drivers but that's entirely insignificant compared to the fact that I was not charged for excess baggage and I was well in time for my Miami flight in Curacao and I was not in Suriname hospital being treated for out-of-control cellulitis. Instead, I arrived back in the US around 3:00 in the afternoon  to wait in the not too terribly long lines for immigration and baggage claim at the Miami Airport and rode the Sky Train with all my stuff in all my luggage to pick up a very inexpensive rental car (thank you FGCU) and drive back across the Everglades to my little house under the oak trees.

Since then it's been the usual post-travel checklist and picking up the pieces following a monthlong absence - replacing the dead battery in the car, bleaching the green mold off the porch, laundry laundry laundry, reinstalling the cat, picking up a few previously dropped balls at work, reconnecting with friends and family, and living in a sometimes surreal mental transit space that keeps posting reminders along the lines of three days ago I was buying a cheap Chinese hat in South America or two weeks ago I was painting flowers on the walls of Catty Osman's bar, not to mention the constant internal injunction while driving to stay to the right stay to the right stay to the right.

As promised, here's my purchases this trip; they are slowly but surely finding their places in my wildly eclectic house.

Miniature traditional pots from Hamilton Wiltshire in Barbados

Tiny glazed pots from Hammy, as well as a teeny addition to my global spoon collection

On the left is a flying fish plate I bought from Maggie Bell in 1995; on the right the new 2013 version

Fridge magnets from Red Clay/Fairfield Pottery (the Bells) - small but essential players in their production line

Gorgeous print by Cuban artist Carlos Guzman

Irresistible Cuban shower curtains printed with images from well-known painters

Miniature vessels from the (East) Indian potter at Carifesta - I can't believe I didn't get his name, gotta fix that

Maroon tourist art - a carved wood mirror, and a beautifully simple painted wooden panel

On the left, an incredibly seductive antique Dutch glass bottle dated 1830-1840; it joins my earlier purchases of antique Dutch clay bottles in Guyana (on right)

The lovely, lovely bottle from Carib/Galibi potter Marlene Aloema

And the beautiful mixed media piece titled Rituals by Surinamese photographer  Tanya Frijmersum

My cat River of course had to help while I photographed everything; at this point we have both settled back into the house and the porch but since I am now working at home full-time we are both adjusting to a very different routine (she's doing it way better than I am) and I am trying to figure out just exactly how to go about this book business. I still have many pages of travel notes to write up, follow-up  emails to send, video interviews to transcribe, images to sort and process, and many many books to read so I started with Andrea Stuart's astonishing family history Sugar in the Blood - absolutely brilliant, evocatively imagined and meticulously researched history of people and sugar cane in Barbados, rips the lid off a colonial plantation society toxic with fear and fatally corrupted by the absolute power of the master-slave relationship. Next its on to American archeologist Mark Hauser's decade of publications on Caribbean ceramics, particularly critical as I prepare for my October trip to Jamaica. And, of course, the writing begins - expanded chapter outlines and the first draft of the introduction, then I think the sections on Guyana and Barbados. We'll see.

I'll be posting now and then over the next six weeks; I have GOT to focus on both the travel plans and the paper I'm writing for the Jamaica conference but I'm definitely looking forward to it, and to the trip that will follow to Trinidad for Diwali, the Hindu Festival of Lights.

I was thinking recently about the excitement of my very first encounters with Caribbean pots in 1993, and how bewildered I was when a potter friend who had traveled briefly in the region casually dismissed them as crude and uninteresting. After twenty years I bless every day that I have had with these wonderful pots and their extraordinary makers.