Day 70

So how are we fairing in this Covid storm so far? Seventy days in isolation; I never imagined on Day 1 that we would still be here more than 2 months later. I spend today finalizing the new menus, for when the beach  restaurant and the coffee shop open in 10 days time. When we closed, it took a matter of hours to shut down the show. There’s a surprising amount of work involved to coordinate the reopening. Preparing for the unknown is never a straightforward task. 

Today the U.K. claims more lives lost to Covid per capita, than the USA, Spain, Brazil, Russia or Italy. The future is certainly unclear for the country where my children were schooled and my parents have settled.

This afternoon, I draw a palm tree, because I find it calming, and it is my new found fascination as a series. I could draw 100 palm trees. If I draw 2 per week, I could have the series finished in less than a year. I can cover an entire wall in framed sketches of unique palm trees. That’s a joyful thought, to me at least.

I find palm trees fascinating, because they are almost hurricane proof. Hurricane season officially started here last Monday, the first day of June. With any tremendous storm, comes the lashing winds and flying waves, torrents of rain and water taking over the streets. Pieces of houses, cars, boats and big trees are tossed around like playthings during extreme weather, but palm trees seem perfectly able to stand their ground. If you observe them in a storm, they bend like enormous feathers, yielding to the wind. In fact, some palm species – such as the royal palm – will preserve themselves by allowing their leaves to be snapped off in high winds, in order to reduce overall wind resistance and spare the trunk and the bud from damage. Of course the leaves suffer, and palm detritus is part and parcel of storm clean-up, but the fronds grow back within a few months, and beyond a year, you’d never know the palm had been hit by anything at all. No resistance is their survival game plan, and the reason they are often the only trees that are left standing in the path of a hurricane. I could  learn a thing or two from studying palm trees. Their survival strategy is this:

“Resistance is futile.”

I saw a friend post these exact words of wisdom in her social feed recently; so it must apply to us humans too. The theory goes that the key is to allowing negativity in, but to give it no energy. Instead, turning ones’ thoughts to something more positive will allow the negativity to dissipate, out of neglect. Apparently palm trees, after enduring significant stress, undergo a period of rapid growth. You can see it in the annual rings around the bark, where the striations become uncharacteristically further apart, marking the period of an unusually positive growth rate. These wider annual rings can often be traced back to the years that succeed a bad storm. A lot of trees in the Cayman Islands bear scars from Hurricane Ivan, the Category 5 hurricane that tore the islands apart in 2004. If you look carefully, you can see tree barks show evidence of growth that came afterwards. I like the idea that positive growth relies on the the existence of negativity. It’s relevant that the very thing that gives these trees longevity is the challenges along the way. Many of these palm trees that sway in the breeze on our beach, were once coconuts that I planted when I first arrived on the island. Now they tower over head, shift with the winds, surrendering to every chop and change Mother Nature throws at them. We have been on this journey together, these palms and I, and I just hope that I weather the storms as well as they do.

The four of us cycle this evening as a family. D plays music from A’s portable speaker. We race and play as we weave down the roads on our bicycles. After the dog is exhausted from her walk, she rests her head at my feet, and B and I share a sundown drink. 

To the palm trees I toast silently, as I raise my glass.