It All Felt Ordinary

Last month, I was in Antigua for practical reasons. Family. A few errands. Most visits are like that. You arrive, you move quickly, you leave again without really seeing anything.

This time, I had a couple of days with no schedule. So I drove around.

Not with a destination in mind. Just moving through places that once structured my childhood. Roads I knew before I knew their names. Villages that still felt familiar even though the houses and buildings had changed.

I drove past beaches I grew up around. And without trying to, I remembered.

Sandcastles collapsing under careless feet. Full cricket games played on open stretches of sand, a dozen of us kids running without worrying about time. Smoke from barbecues drifting across the beach. Steamed fish. Laughter carrying to and from groups along the beach.

I remembered staying until the sun was gone, temporary lights strung up as if night was optional. Watching my uncles and their friends pull fishing nets from the water, heavy with movement. Enjoying another round of food. Finally, falling asleep on the drive home, salt still on my skin, sand still in my pants, waking briefly just enough to feel the car stop.

These were not special days. They were ordinary.

They were ordinary because nothing about them needed defending. The ocean did not feel fragile. The land did not feel temporary. You did not need to plan around nature. You lived inside it and assumed it would hold its shape.

Driving now, years later, I realized how much of my sense of normal was built on that assumption.

This year, I did not stop at the beaches. I did not walk the sand. I just kept driving, letting memory run alongside what I could see through the windshield. The contrast did not announce itself. It arrived quietly. A shoreline narrowing here. A seaweed smell there. Equipment parked where there used to be nothing but the breeze and shade.

Some beaches now need weekly attention. Seaweed comes in heavy and persistent, not as an occasional visitor but as a condition. It gets removed, hauled away, managed. With it comes a smell that lingers longer than it should, and the understanding that this is no longer an exception. It is routine.

Whole systems have grown around that routine. Workers. Schedules. Budgets. Decisions that once did not exist because there was nothing to respond to. Nature has not become ugly. It has become demanding.

I kept thinking about how close we lived to the water when I was young. Two minutes walk. Four if you were slow. The ocean was not a destination. It was background. It framed our days without inserting itself into them.

That framing has shifted.

There are places where the water now reaches walls that once felt like a distant safety line from the ocean. Walls that used to mark the end of play and the beginning of caution. Like the stone walls that marked the boundary for our beach cricket at Half Moon Bay, Antigua, in the late 1980s. As children, we never questioned why they were set so far back.

In more recent decades, it’s become clear they were built for a different ocean. A smaller one.

This is not a dramatic realization. There is no single moment where it all clicks into place. It is more like noticing that a familiar room has been rearranged slowly over time, while you were away.

Living now in St. Kitts has sharpened that awareness. The heat feels heavier. The seasons feel less polite. Hurricanes no longer feel like rare tests of luck but recurring questions that must be answered again and again. Preparation has become a permanent posture.

That is part of what led me to build dewedda.com. It was not born from fear or activism. It started as attention. Watching patterns. Tracking storms. Trying to understand extremes that were becoming less extreme and more normal. What began as a hobby quietly turned into a habit of looking closer.

When you grow up with something stable, you notice when it stops behaving the way it used to.

I do not romanticize the past. The islands were never gentle. In many ways time had been more kind to our quality of life. Nature has always carried consequences. But there was more of a consistency to it. A set of expectations you could learn.

What feels different now is how unpredictable nature has become. In the sense that the background of daily life no longer feels fixed in the way it once did.

Antigua is still beautiful. St. Kitts is still beautiful. The Caribbean is still beautiful. The water still catches the light the same way it always has. It feels different when you arrive carrying memory with you than when you arrive with fresh eyes.

I know what these places look like when they were unbothered. I carry that reference with me whether I want to or not. It makes every change legible in a way it might not be to someone seeing it for the first time.

This is not grief. It is recognition.

I didn’t know way back then, that those moments were special because they felt permanent.

Now, knowing they are not, perhaps the work is simply to notice them, and to help the next generation recognize their ordinary days as special. So that one day, as they travel these same island roads, their memories will be as fond as mine.

The island world we grew up inside has shifted under forces far larger than us, and in their wake, we, the people of the Caribbean, have adapted. Quietly. Professionally. One system at a time.