I grew up in a little district in St. James, Jamaica called Belfont.
A place where to this day, people still catch water to drink and wash clothes in the same river, sometimes at the same time.
A river that we bathed in bare chested. A river that holds many secrets.
There were many mornings when, with buckets in hand, rags rolled up in clenched fists and a soap to share among us, we would trudge through the pass to bathe before school. But many mornings, especially when the time was really cold, all we did was glance at the river, shivered and teetering carefully on its edge; expertly performed a provisional cleansing routine we called 'tidying ourselves'.
After performing the 'necessaries', still balancing gingerly on a broad enough rock stone, we would dip our buckets in a 'clean' part of the river above where we had just 'bathe' as our mother had repeatedly instructed us to do and head back up the hill via the same pass that snaked pass Ms. Clemmy's and Cow Son's house.
We made sure to drag our feet against the tall grass that hugged the dirt pass, confident the dewy moisture from the grass would help erase any overlooked telltale signs of our deceit.
The river used to chatter and clamber merrily over stones on its way to be emptied into the Great River and when I was little it seemed like a pretty big river at the time.
But later, as I became older and especially when I hadn't been home in a while and I went back to Belfont to visit, it seemed to have shrunk.
