By Diana McCaulayI'm flying home for a few days to deal with work issues.
On the plane, the Jamaican immigration form affords me some amusement. I notice the emphatic statement at the top: "Please keep this form in a safe place and report its loss IMMEDIATELY to the immigration department".
Idly, I imagine actually trying to do that, calling immigration and asking for the department which keeps track of lost forms and reissues new ones. There's probably another form to be filled out reporting the loss of the form of the first part.
My pen hesitates at the form's request for my address. Where in fact do I now live? My apartment in Jamaica is rented, it cannot be said I live there.
It appears I do live in Seattle, Washington, United States, despite still being a resident and citizen of Jamaica.
Then there is the request for information about my occupation, which I had trouble with even before this untethered period of my life.
Am I a writer? An environmentalist? A registered pain in the backside, as a friend recently described me? A rabble-rousing, tree-hugging, turtle-loving activist? And now, at this advanced age, am I really a student?
I put "writer"; it's the oldest thread that binds the edges of my life together.
Sad sight
We are circling Kingston, it appears we will land from the east. I see the mountains with their bare, green patches where the trees have long gone, the houses continuing their creep over Long Mountain, the low, brown cast of air pollution over the city, the unremarkable high-rise buildings on the waterfront.
No-one could say Kingston is a lovely city, it merely occupies a lovely location, but the people who preside over what Kingston has become do not understand this.
Touching down, I see a strip of marl at the edge of the runway, the airport work must be finished, already grass is pushing up through the new tarmac. Nature is relentless, I think, particularly in the tropics.
Stepping out of the plane, the hard edge of the light makes me close my eyes, the air is warm and wet and heavy. There is no need to hurry into the terminal building, no freezing breeze causes me to put my hands in my pockets, no icy rain slips down the back of my neck. The computers are still not working at immigration.
The customs officer says: "You come back already?"
Yes, I'm back and this is what I find. Hope Road is finished, and a tree or two has even been planted, Mandela Highway appears to be as I left it.
The Mona Dam was almost empty, now it is almost full. I'm sure all considerations of water conservation measures have been abandoned.
I've learned about this in one of my classes, it's called the water cycle and it goes like this: Drought, concern, rain, apathy, drought, concern etc.
I find Jamaica laden with fear. Businesswoman Bev Lopez has just emerged from her ordeal with kidnappers/extortionists, there has been a series of murders, nothing all that unusual for us, but I have the sense of an entire nation hunkered down, a people under siege.
"You're so lucky," says nearly everyone I see, "to be in a safe place like Seattle."
Yes, I am lucky for this time away from home, but that is what it is: Time away from home.
The truth is I am glad to be home, overwhelmingly, unreasonably glad. I realize the obvious: No-one I love is in Seattle. In the end, the quality of your life is entirely about the quality of your relationships.
So I ran my first afternoon back, ran through an afternoon crisp with some kind of cold front, ran through drenching sunshine. The khus khus grass had grown high around the dam and scratched my legs. The mosquitoes buzzed me - did they think I was new blood?
Definitely home
The air was full of the young smell of mown grass. If my address were ever to be Seattle, I would commit myself to exile.
But I realized America had energised me, made me feel it was possible to act, possible to effect change. Middle-class America does not present an atmosphere of helplessness and hopelessness. I felt irritated with the passiveness of Jamaicans, at least the non-criminal ones.
I thought of Richard Coe, who said we Jamaicans are talking ourselves into the catastrophe of paralysis. I'm now even more sure he was right.
The next morning, I woke early and saw the mountains through security grilles. I buckled a bracelet of beads around my ankle - can't do that in Seattle, there, I wear boots.
Then I went to work. On the front door, there was a new sign: "Premises Under Video Surveillance..."
I was definitely home.
