It’s ridiculous how often you have to say hello in Cayman Kai.
Passing someone on the street is one thing, but you have to do it when you are in Chisholm’s convenience store, or in our little coffee shop, Espresso, back in the Before Covid (BC) days when it was open. If you’re driving to town and pass someone returning from their day on ‘the dark side’, (that’s town, to non-Kaiers,) you just lift a finger from the steering wheel, as if to say I see you, you see me, we both live in this ‘delightful community by the sea’. Whatever that means. This island-specific friendliness even has it’s own hashtag: #caymankind . It’s so common, you half expect to see road signs saying “Slow down! Friendly folk crossing.”
Most of the houses are owner-occupied along Water Cay Road, that leads to Starfish Point, the tourists slowly being squeezed out by folks who want to build their beautiful beach home with a dock, a landscaped yard, and ‘punny’ house name to sit amongst Kai-conut, Kai-lypso, Kai Sera Sera, Blue-S-Kai, and Peace and Kai-it. (Yes. Really.)
Our house was previously named Kai-risma by the first owner. You can imagine how long that house name sign stayed up after I got the keys. We never got around to giving our home a new name, sticking with the safer number of the street address option. Some years ago, D came up with a suggestion, How about Kai-yak? With a picture of a someone puking their guts up? I never took the idea seriously. And yet, some years later, that name too was taken. Perhaps we will revisit the house name again one day.
Whilst the eastern part of Cayman Kai, towards Chisholms, has a more local, more real Caymanian feel, with families who have lived here for generations, towards Starfish Point is more like an upscale retirement community. Look out a street-facing window on any given morning, and you’d think we were filming a Centrum commercial, all these silver-foxes, grey-wolves and white-haired seniors walking, jogging or cycling past the house. Later in the day, when the heat cranks up, some residents will purr by in their golf cart, merrily offering lifts to anyone young and lazy enough to need a ride down the road. Our teens, (who love any good excuse to get out of a walk) hardly give this any thought. But to D and I, who are now comfortably in our forties, – it’s eerie. That’ll be us, in, say, twenty years, we think. How can that be, when only yesterday we were the cool kids with a beach bar?
Of course, the alternative is worse. In twenty years we could be unwell, or not here at all. At least all the Cayman Kai residents look like they are having a jolly time in their latter years, daily sun-down cocktails on the beach, regular multi-generational visits from the family, the occasional boat day.
Today is Cayman’s first Sunday in ages where we are not in ‘hard curfew’. This means we can leave the house for a walk, a jog, or a cycle. You can imagine how busy our road is today. And how much we have said hello already.
