Solitary exploring, island style

After we moved to the school campus in Eita, and I was no longer going to Rurubao School, there were times when I spent a lot of time roaming the neighborhood, alone.

I was the oldest of the kids. Four brothers followed me, and then my two sisters. My sisters were so much younger than I that they weren't much company. I did more babysitting of them - I was a second mother to them - than anything else with them. Combine that with the fact that I did a correspondence course at home for 7th grade. Island children my age were different than me, and we didn't connect very well. I didn't look down on them, but we had different interests, different ways, different customs. I was always better with older people, especially adults. My English friends my age all went to boarding schools in England during the school year, and lived far away from us when they were on the island with their parents, so even then it took a lot of planning to get together with them. Consequently I spent a lot of time playing by myself.

In Eita, on the other side of the main road from the school's campus, there was an islet with channel between main land and the islet. This was on the lagoon side of the island. The channel was fairly deep for ocean water so close to land. It would go up to my arm pits at high tides, and somehow I don't remember it going away during low tides. I think it was as wide as a two or three lane road. It was slow moving and warm. I used to wade luxuriously through the water to the islet on the other side. I remember raising my arms just above the water level and wading across.

That islet was uninhabited - it was wild and free. There were little scrub trees, coconut trees, patches of sand grasses, and lots of room for solitary play. I imagined lots of adventures there. There were a lot of trees on the lagoon side of the islet which leaned out over the water edge, and some of them had large roots that stood above the water even at high tide. It was beautiful, peaceful and serene.

I don't know what drew me more, the peace, the beauty, the time alone, or my imagination being set free there. It was so soul satisfying though, and I was drawn there often. Even the passage through the channel was peaceful.