Steel drums.

They play in the background like a pulse in your ear after a good workout. The people with ready smiles and hearty laughs show you how to move to them in ways you didn't know hips could. Then you retreat to a recliner to doze off under suns more intimate with the equator than the ones you know.

In comes the new year, and with all of the celebration some part of you feels forlorn. A brief sun shower comes because you think of what could have been. But as fast as you do, you remember what was, what is and the tears get lost in laughter. Then you hear them--those steel drums--and you begin to shake those hips that your mama gave you. First slowly. . .then faster and faster. You throw your head back to feel the rhythm--that of other suns and that of life--both reminding you that it will be alright and that it already is.

Yeah, mon.