Salt

Salt, precursor to both corruption and preservation, is everywhere on a Caribbean island. There are jumbles of sharp-cornered crystals, and glazes, and improbable structures which rise between dissipating rains, but the most-often insidious is the airborne. Though is it poetic, and a certain level functionally descriptive, to conceive of rust being “in the air,” it’s actually salt which infests the humid breezes wafting over the land. There’s a strange notion for outsiders to wrap their minds around: humidity, on a desert island. Trees drop their leaves in the dry season, not winter, and even the cactus refuse to bloom, yet the air is sometimes thick with moisture. And salt.