Love, Sun, and Lizard Poop: Finding Love While Building a House in American Paradise

By Gwendolyn Stevens

By 2009 Id been a widow for three years. Then an old colleague invited me down to the Virgin Islands. But how could I even think about a new life when my husband was dead. Queen Victoria mourned forever. Still, I went. Water Island was lovely: blue sky, cream-puff clouds, palm fronds, trade winds, turquoise water, and white sand beaches. It was scary, exploring a new love, but without love whats the point of life? We decided to build a house. And no one builds a house in the West Indies if she knows what she is doing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jan 16, 2014
• ISBN: 9781493153916

Gwendolyn Stevens

Precocious but stupid I entered college at 16, married at 17 and was the mother of two by 19. I returned to college at 22, working as a bank clerk, girl-Friday, and researcher. I divorced my fi rst husband and married Sheldon Gardner, my professor at Cal State University, and earned a Ph.D. in psychology. When Sheldon died, I retired to a barrier island in Georgia. Needing a companion I adopted a Yorkie, then became a certifi ed yoga teacher and Buddhist. Somehow I found time to write. First Personality and Bereavement. I needed to make sense of my loss. And then Sheldon’s imaginative memoir, Goombah Luigi’s Grandson: memoir of a Jewish psychologist. Currently Nils, Tahshi and I divide our time between three islands in the Virgins, Georgia, and Maine.

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

PART I

The Invitation

1

The Phone Call

2

Interesting, Very Interesting

3

Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained

4

The Plane

PART II

The Visit

1

Arrival

2

The Morning After

3

Camping At Cinnamon

4

Sailing

5

Fast Lane On A Slow Island

6

Saying Good-Bye

PART III

What Now?

1

Home Is Where I Am

2

Expats And Other Wanderers

3

Absence Makes The Heart Do Something… Or Other

4

Back To Water Island

5

Water, Water Everywhere

6

House Hunting

7

Closing Up Is Hard To Do

PART IV

Island Hopping Or How I Spent My Summer Vacation

1

St. Simons

2

Heading North

3

Chebeague Island

4

What Had I Gotten Myself Into?

5

A Dip In The Briny

6

A Connecticut Yankee Goes South

PART V

Water Island Isn’t For Sissies

1

To Build Or Not To Build

2

Back To Square One

3

Expediter Expediting

4

Setbacks—Who Knew?

5

Money Makes The World Go Around

6

Thanksgiving

7

The First Pour

8

Butterfly Effect In Concrete

9

Pre-Christmas Angst

10

Strong Foundations Build Good Structures

11

Christmas Time Is Party Time

12

Birthday Boy

13

Decisions, Decisions, Decisions

14

Escaping Construction

15

The Perks Of Being Old

16

Poured Concrete’s Cold

17

First Anniversary

18

A Roof Over Our Heads

19

Swimming Upstream

20

Emergency Room

21

Being Taken Care Of

22

What Do You Mean, My Coral Stone’s Missing?

23

Endless Red Tape

24

An Inspector’s Lot

25

Fired By The Curtain Lady!

26

So Little Time, So Much To Do.

27

Marathon

28

This Isn’t Kansas, Or Maybe It Is

29

Light At The End Of The Tunnel Or Down The Rabbit Hole

30

God Said, Let There Be Light. But Wapa Said No!

31

All’s Well That… Well You Know

DEDICATION

To Nick. Brave enough to call. Smart enough to make it work.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I’d like to thank Bob Middlemiss for his editorial support and encouragement. I’m a better writer for having the privilege to work with him. In addition I’d like to Thank Marie Giles, Sarah Turner, Rita Cane and everyone else who helped put this book together. Of course without the house there’d be no book. So a big thanks goes to Dick Weber and Jay Knoepfel for our wonderful home on Water Island. An additional thank you goes to Ken Culbert for telling me about Tracy Kidder’s book House. It was an inspiration. Penultimately I’d like to thank Bobbie and Bill for welcoming me into their family and to our neighbors on Chebeague, Water Island, and Saint Simons for just being. Lastly a big thank you to my family: Alyce & Ed, Anne & Scott, and Nick & Tahshi. I’d be lost without them.

And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive

where we started

and know the place for the first time.

—T. S. Eliot

PART I

THE INVITATION

Do not dwell in the past,

do not dream of the future,

concentrate the mind on the present moment.

—Buddha

Life isn’t about finding yourself.

Life is about creating yourself.

—George Bernard Shaw

1

THE PHONE CALL

I saw the blinking red light on the answering machine as soon as I entered the house. I was curious, with that odd heartbeat, tickety-thump. I didn’t get many calls.

I watched the blinking red light—on, off, on, off.

I picked up Tahshi, my silver-and-gold Yorkie, and scratched her ears as I hooked on her pink leash. I flicked on the British-style, electric teakettle sitting on the green quartz kitchen counter and scurried out the side door into a lovely winter afternoon in the south. Lots of sunshine. Clear blue sky. And a brisk, almost-chilly, salty breeze. Buried away in the house was that blinking red light…

I moved to St. Simons Island, Georgia, from Mystic, Connecticut, in September 2006. I was sixty-two years old and had been a widow for ten months. Since I’d never lived alone, it didn’t take me long to realize the house was too empty with just me in it. I needed a pet.

I’d always had cats. But cats are too independent for a recent widow. What I needed was a dog. A nice, needy dog, who’d look at me with adoring eyes and help me through my days.

But I didn’t adopt Tahshi until July of 2007. In November of 2006, I pressed the buy me button on the National Geographic travel web page for an adventure trek through Tibet to the Everest base camp. I’d always wanted to visit Tibet. But my late husband, Sheldon, had had polio, so he couldn’t have handled the rugged terrain. I could. But I wasn’t sure I had the emotional strength to face the unknown alone. Turned out I could, a vote of confidence and self-affirmation badly needed.

When I returned from the rooftop of the world, I scanned ads in the Brunswick News, the local paper. Finally, in the last week of June, there it was—Yorkie puppies for sale.

The next day, I drove to the very edge of Brunswick where the puppies lived. I picked up and petted the two females that were available. As I sat watching them play, trying to decide which to adopt, one of them tried to crawl up my leg. Well… I didn’t have to choose. She chose me.

A year and a half later, Tahshi and I couldn’t be happier. Her name comes from the Tibetan greeting, Tahshi Delek. We’ve had our disagreements. But she’s only five pounds. When she wants to do one thing and I another, I just pick her up and voila, end of argument.

That January afternoon, as Tahshi and I wandered up North Harrington to Frederica, the first leg in our usual two-mile route, I kept wondering who might have called. Who had triggered that on/off light, still pulsing, still waiting?

My two best friends, Alyce and Anne, worked full time. So I doubted it was either of them. And it couldn’t have been a student because I don’t give out my number. That semester I was teaching general psychology for the College of Coastal Georgia and conflict resolution for Armstrong Atlantic State University.

As Tahshi and I turned the corner onto South Herrington, I considered other possibilities. It could be my physician. I’d recently had some blood work done. A couple of years ago, I was anemic, so I keep a close eye. Of course, the call could just be a telemarketer.

I stopped short. Tahshi looked up at me. It could be that creepy fellow from the fitness center.

A few months ago, a man stopped me as I was leaving Wynn Dixie. He said he’d seen me at the fitness center and that he knew I was a widow. He said it right, no gloom and doom.

He seemed harmless, so when he asked me out, I said yes. We agreed to meet the next evening at Brogans, in the village. Okay, best spin, the evening wasn’t horrible. But as soon as I got home, after walking Tahshi, of course, I called Anne. And as soon as she answered, I started crying.

He was boring. He didn’t read books. Didn’t go to movies. Wasn’t interested in anything I was. Mostly, of course, he wasn’t Sheldon. After that, I refused each and every invitation, but apparently he didn’t understand no, thank you. He kept calling, leaving flowers, and sending me little notes. He would have had a better shot if he’d sent me a book.

Forty minutes after Tahshi and I left the house, we were back where we started. But call me a coward, I just didn’t want to face whoever or whatever was on the answering machine.

I unhooked Tahshi and gave her a few pieces of salmon and sweet potato kibble. Yorkies can be hypoglycemic, so she eats frequently. I poured boiling water over the Earl Gray tea bag in my hand-painted porcelain teacup, filling the kitchen with the aroma of bergamot. I slung my Stone Mountain briefcase on my shoulder and got the teacup. As I reached the bottom of the stairs, I glanced at the blinking red light. I didn’t succumb, feeling that odd tickety-thump.

Until Tahshi was a year old, her legs weren’t long enough to maneuver stairs. She climbs quite ably now, but every so often, when she wants to be carried, she whines and looks pleadingly at me with her big brown eyes. That day, she raced up the stairs ahead of me. By the time I reached the second floor, she was sitting, waiting.

A familiar turn took me into my bedroom. I changed out of my teaching outfit into jeans and T-shirt. Then I carefully hung my skirt in the closet, set my shoes on the shoe-shelf, and placed the sweater in a drawer. I didn’t use to be so fastidious. I changed the first time I saw Tahshi nesting with a cashmere sweater.

While I was busy, Tahshi climbed her stairs to the bed and then proceeded, as usual, to nudge each of the three teddy bears sitting in front of the headboard onto the floor. Happy with that, she rolled around on the bedspread. Her method of back-scratching.

The phone, the phone, the phone . . .

A few minutes later, I picked up my briefcase and Tahshi. Bare feet padded down the hall to my in-home office above the garage. The terra-cotta walls lend a warming touch, as does the built-in oak bookcase. My desk sits in front of one of five double hung windows. Whenever my muse departs, I turn my chair and stare down the street at live oaks dripping with Spanish moss until she returns.

I lowered Tahshi onto the beige Berber wall-to-wall carpet and turned on my desktop computer. While the machine warmed up, I took the tests I’d given my general psychology students that morning from my briefcase and placed them on the oval oak worktable. With teacup within reach, a red pen firmly in hand, I went to work. Forty minutes later, I recorded the grades electronically.

Feeling good about a task completed, comfortable in my routine, I went downstairs to prepare dinner—that night, a package of brussels sprouts in cheese sauce. This widow knows how to live.

I know, I know. Scads of single people eat alone. And go out alone. And those selfsame scads would quickly point a finger and tsk tsk. But the fun of cooking is sharing. The point of eating, besides the obvious need for fuel, is social, ultimately loving, like filling Tahshi’s bowl. Consequently, one of a hundred or more changes attached to my being a widow was that I stopped cooking.

No recipe contests. No nifty tofu creations. No creative culinary accomplishments of any kind. Now, I zap a package of frozen vegetables. Cut a piece of fruit. Or open a tin of smoked oysters.

Finally, as my dinner heated, I walked to the answering machine and stared at it. Come on, you’ve trekked through Tibet for Pete’s sake. This is a cakewalk.

I said a quick prayer to St. Philomena that it wasn’t bad news or my persistent, boring non-reader. She’s a patron saint for lost causes. I pushed Play.

Hello. This is Nils Wessell. Pause. I’m calling… well, I wondered if you’d have any interest in visiting me on Water Island, in the U. S. Virgin Islands.

And there it was.

2

INTERESTING, VERY INTERESTING

In 1982, I was hired by the U. S. Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut, to teach psychology. In 1992, I was promoted to director of academic resources. I still taught psychology, but only one course a semester. In 1991, Nils Wessell arrived as chair of the Humanities Department. Since psychology is housed in Humanities, for a year he was my boss. Well, as much as any chair of any college faculty is a boss.

As colleagues, Nils and I had been cordial. But we hadn’t gone to lunch. Hadn’t attended the same parties. Hadn’t shared friends. And in spite of knowing of him for fifteen years, all I knew about him was that he was a graduate of Stanford University and had a Ph.D. in political science from Columbia. The fact that he was a Reagan Republican and had been director of the Office of Research for United States Information Agency was something my liberal friends and I joked about. I also knew he was divorced, had a son, and spent as much time as he could on some island in Maine.

Nils, as did several colleagues, came to Sheldon’s funeral. But Nils was the only one who invited me to dinner.

I’m going home with Anne, I told him. I won’t be back until Friday.

What about Friday? he asked. Would you like to come for Thanksgiving leftovers?

One of my earliest memories is Mom telling me, Don’t wear your heart on your sleeve. So I didn’t. Instead, I built a solid wall to stash my emotions behind. And my wall’s been useful. Especially during my first marriage. My first husband, David, was a George Clooney look-alike who thought wives should be barefoot and pregnant. When I told him I was going back to school, he said, No, you’re not. But since I knew there was no way in hell I wasn’t, I squirreled everything about school behind my wall. There’d be no sharing over dinner. What happened at school stayed there.

Priding myself on my control, you can imagine my surprise when Sheldon died and my Jericho wall tumbled. Fell right apart, leaving me an emotional wreck. As a psychologist, I knew it was important not to let my grief overwhelm me. I had to let others help. Besides, Sheldon’s death was hard for them too.

So even though what I really wanted was to hide in my closet and pull a quilt over my head, I smiled at Nils and said, Sure.

Six o’clock Friday, November 27, Nils picked me up from the apartment in Groton where I was living. Earlier that year, Sheldon and I had sold our Mystic house, an 1853 Victorian on the Stonington side of the river.

Nils also lived in Mystic but in an 1818 cape across the street from the Mystic River on the Groton side of town. Once inside, he introduced me to his son, Kerry. A thin twenty-one-year-old with long, dark hair, Kerry was a senior at Bard College. A few minutes later, Nils’s neighbor arrived.

Recognizing the tall woman with an explosion of blond hair as one of the sailing instructors at Mystic Seaport, I blurted out, You taught me to sail.

Hope I did a good job, she said, laughing. Her gravely voice was the result of years of smoking.

I don’t remember much about the evening except that the house felt warm and cozy. Smelled good too. I joined the conversation just a little and only poked at my food. It was tasty, but I wasn’t hungry. I do remember eating most of a piece of pumpkin pie. At nine-thirty, Nils took me home. He insisted on walking me to my door.

How about a hug? I said.

He hugged me, kissed my forehead, and left.

It was nice, but I had expected something more, I guess. A little extra warmth, perhaps.

The following week the semester ended.

One of my all-time favorite films is Christmas in Connecticut, with Barbara Stanwyck, Dennis Morgan, Sydney Greenstreet, and C. Z. Cuddles Sakall. But I didn’t want to spend Christmas alone in Connecticut. So I decided to drive my British racing green BMW 325 convertible to Georgia. In 2003, on impulse while at a writing conference, Sheldon and I bought a house on St. Simons Island. The plan had been to sell the Mystic house and move south.

That’s how the best-laid plans get wrecked.

Luckily, I didn’t have to test my courage to drive south alone. Ed, Alyces’s husband, volunteered to come with me. Alyce is a five-foot two blonde nurse practitioner with an MA in psychology. Ed is a six foot, sandy-haired retired Coast Guard captain. They’ve been married for over forty years. I met Alyce when Ed was head of facilities engineering at CGA. Alyce and I had auditioned for that year’s Cadet Musical, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. Alyce got the part of head secretary. I got to be a charlady and let’s not go into it.

Before leaving Connecticut, I had started giving away parts of my old life. Goodwill got Sheldon’s clothes. A post-graduate student got Sheldon’s clinical books. He’d been a clinical psychologist. And Bill Sanders got the season tickets for the Southeast Connecticut Symphony.

As a recent retiree from the Dean of Faculty at CGA, Bill had been my boss. He was also my role model for how to survive the death of a spouse. Our situations were vastly different. Bill’s late wife had been ill for several years. But his ability to rebound gave me hope. A few years after his wife’s death, Bill remarried. At Alyce and Ed’s house after Sheldon’s funeral, Bill told me, Once you make new memories, it gets easier.

One thing I had not yet given away were my season tickets to Trinity Repertory Theater in Providence, Rhode Island. I wasn’t sure I wanted to give them away. I like going to theater. Was once a drama major. And Trinity Rep. is really good.

I hemmed and hawed about what to do. Three days after Christmas while in Georgia, very quickly, before I could change my mind, I e-mailed Nils an invitation.

The next day he e-mailed back, accepting. I thought about his acceptance, savored it.

Sheldon’s VW station wagon was still in Connecticut. And while it was a constant reminder of my loss, having it there meant I could leave the BMW in Georgia. So on January 4th I flew back to Connecticut to face my final semester at CGA.

I didn’t see Nils until the Sunday of the play when he picked me up and drove us to Providence: the tickets were for a matinee. There was a nice, spicy tang of cologne in the car, very different from Sheldon’s. As we made our way up Interstate 95, I kept wondering if this was a date or merely two colleagues going to see a play. More importantly, what did I want it to be? As Bill Sanders put it, things got easier with new memories, new feelings.

But I wasn’t sure I liked the idea of finding a new someone to love. Sure I’d have someone to share my life with. Someone to cuddle next to in bed. But that someone could also die.

Besides, people are not interchangeable. Sheldon was special. No one could replace him.

And yet…

I didn’t want to spend the next thirty years alone. Didn’t want to turn into a crotchety old woman. Didn’t want to end up emotionally empty.

I took a breath and repeated my mantra: What is, is. What will be, will be. A bit Doris Day, but it works for me.

From my few previous conversations with Nils, I knew he was smart and witty. Sexy too, even at sixty-three. His well-toned six-foot body—he swims laps—was topped by buzz-cut gray hair. Brown eyes peered from an oval face, just above a button of a Swedish nose. I liked the eyes, which could be warm, drawing you in. But at other times they could be distant, searching for focus points, the sky, a thought.

What I hadn’t known was how attentive he’d be. He was almost courtly. And he has a sly sense of humor. An attractive combination.

I invited him to Trinity’s next production, Hamlet. But early on the day of the play he canceled. He’d caught the flu.

Not to be deterred, I invited him to the final play of the season, Cyrano de Bergerac. He said he’d like to accept, but he’d be bicycling through France. In late May, he invited me to dinner at the Inn at Mystic.

I spent my last summer in Connecticut working at school, as far removed from Barbara Stanwyck as a Connecticut summer is from winter. As the fall semester began and everyone returned, I wondered if Nils would call. He didn’t. And when I announced I was retiring and leaving Connecticut, he didn’t send an e-mail wishing me well. Reflections on a tang of cologne faded.

*     *     *

Fast forward two years. Nils and another colleague were retiring, and Anne was having a party in their honor. As a lure, she said, If you come up, I’ll arrange your Professor Emerita ceremony.

A member of the second class of women to graduate from CGA, Anne is a slight-bodied blonde. She was a Coast Guard lieutenant assigned to the rotating faculty when we met. Several years later, she was selected for the Permanent Commissioned Teaching Faculty. By 2008, Anne was a captain and head of the Humanities Department.

At first I declined her invitation. I didn’t want to go back to Connecticut. Didn’t want my old memories reactivated. Didn’t want to be a Professor Emerita.

But…

Two months earlier, Linda Trompeter and her partner Jennie Congleton stopped by to visit. They were going to a conference in Florida and… well… St. Simons was on the way. I met Linda and Jennie at Southeast Missouri State University in Cape Girardeau. Linda and I were assistant professors. Linda in philosophy and me in psychology.

A pudgy mensch with short salt-and-pepper hair, Linda (in 2008) was the executive director of the Northeastern Pennsylvania Diversity Education Consortium and special assistant to the President of Misericordia College for diversity issues. Linda is also a great salesperson. During her two-day visit, she talked me into presenting a workshop on diversity and personality styles for her consortium.

Well… If I was going to be in Pennsylvania two days before Anne’s party, why not channel Bob Barker—Come on up?

I booked Tahshi at the kennel, booked the flights, and booked a rental car for Connecticut. But what to wear? I’d given away my winter clothes, so I went shopping. The Brunswick, Georgia, T. J. Maxx had everything I needed.

On Wednesday, December 3, Linda picked me up at the Scranton airport and drove us to her small, modern two-bedroom house in Dallas. The next morning, we drove to the college where I was to give my workshop—Personality and Communication Style. It was a big hit. Over a hundred people attended. And there were so many questions I didn’t get through the Power-Point presentation I’d slaved over.

Sadly, my interaction with a psychology class later that afternoon wasn’t so much a hit as a hit between the eyes. Two weeks earlier, I’d sent the professor excerpts from my latest book, Personality and Bereavement.

For some unexplained reason, perhaps Sheldon was guiding me, I had kept a grief journal. Putting down my thoughts and feelings helped me put the trauma of his death in perspective. And after the funeral, I read everything I could find. I needed to understand bereavement. Needed to put my grief in context. Needed to know how others had felt.

Bottom line, I didn’t like what I read. The books were too namby-pamby for this ex-Californian, tell-it-like-it-is woman. But what bothered me most was that just about every book I read made it seem as if there’s only one way to grieve.

Well, I knew that was hooey. I’d been part of a grief counseling group. For three months, four widows and two widowers met and shared our experiences and feelings. And let me tell you, each of us handled grief uniquely. So in my book, I used the Myers Briggs Type Indicator to explain the differences I saw. I came up with sixteen different ways to grieve.

And my book is blunt. The first sentence is This is the worst day of your life.

Anyway, when I sent the professor the excerpts, I expected him to give them to students well in advance of my showing up. But he hadn’t. Instead, he made copies that morning. The students had not read the material. They had no idea what I was talking about. So I ended up back at the old stand, lecturing.

Saturday morning I flew to Hartford, Connecticut. As I stood in line at the Avis kiosk, I wondered if I was being too impetuous. What if Nils had forgotten about me? What if he was involved with someone? What if…

Is a PT Cruiser, okay? the Avis clerk asked.

Yes, I said, smiling. I’d always wanted a Cruiser.

Turned out, I didn’t like it. It was clunky. And awkward to drive. The only good thing was its high chassis. Sitting taller, I felt on par with truckers. Just like when I used to drive my VW bus around southern California. It wasn’t yellow and it didn’t have flowers painted on the side, but the VW bus was fun.

I arrived at Anne’s house in Hampton at five. Anne and her husband, Scott, bought the antique, two-story cape in 2003. It sits on eleven acres of forest. Closest to the house is a well-maintained garden. And the garden’s two ponds come with fish and frogs.

Anne was in a dither when I arrived. But by seven, we’d