Home again jiggity jig

Meredith’s favorite taxi driver was waiting for her by the freight area. She wasn’t going to bother her son to pick her up.

       “How was America?” asked Bobby.

       “Tiring.”

        “So I see,” he said as she waved down a forklift carrying a large crate. “You never travel light.”

         “There’s a pallet too,” she said. “Bark mulch.”

         “That time of year,” Bobby said.

          “Yes,” said Meredith with delight. “My first ramblers are already blooming. I do love this time of year.” The forklifts zoomed on and off the boat, carrying refrigerators and dishwashers, flats of annuals and six-foot trees, fencing and cement blocks and pallet after pallet of beer. Getting ready for season. The bright blue metal box from the Post Office sat waiting to be loaded on the next boat.

     “Watch out for the nasturtiums—they’re fragile.” As Bobby loaded—annuals, dog food, groceries, mower parts—Meredith waved to others waiting for freight. She knew most of them, of course, this time of year. Islanders. She knew their children, their siblings, their grandfathers, and who their fathers really were—even if they themselves didn’t. Hells bells, the Winfields had settled the island in 1661, and she was blood kin to most of them.  Not to mention that they had elected her First Warden of the town, term after term for nearly thirty years.

         Retirement was a definite comedown. It was difficult to adjust to being a nobody when she had been the most powerful person on Block Island.  For all those years she had been a monarch. Now she was just the President of the Garden Club. Still, there wasn’t a lot she didn’t know about Block Island and the thousand souls who lived here year-round.

      And what she didn’t know, Bobby did.