Visitors are clearly not beating a path to her door. Tonight I'm the only guest, and Dr. Thompson sits down at a nearby table to keep me company on the patio as I enjoy a fine meal of callaloo soup and chicken and pork in a peppery cassava sauce that Agatha has cooked up. In her lilting, measured tones, Dr. Thompson leads us on a conversational marathon past mile markers that include evolution, faith, God, cloning, and the environment, with detours to Queen Victoria and Monica Lewinsky. Finally, both of us wearying, we sit in silence as a steady wind blows in off the coast. "Those are the Easter winds," she says, "which means it's kite- flying season." And then she softly sings, as if to herself, "Let's go fly a kite, up to the highest height…" I have been seduced.

The rooms at Morne Fendue are utilitarian, with no air-conditioning or television. The sole decoration in mine is an image of Jesus on a funeral card that someone had affixed to the mirror. But the sheets are soft, the ceiling fan churns up a stiff breeze, and I sleep more soundly than I have in years, drifting off to the rustling of the wind in the banana palms.

Grenada is short on bad views. No matter where you stand on the island, it is invariably green, moody, and pulsing with life. From the beach, gently sloping hills climb inland to steep serrated peaks. Hiking through the rain forest in Grand Étang National Park and Forest Reserve, I find fertile valleys thick with bamboo and mahogany that are cut through with swollen rivers feeding into a crater lake. But it is only from the sea that you can take in the nature of the coastline, seventy-five miles of ocher cliffs, quiet harbors, and long stretches of sable and black sand beach. "I went to eight islands looking for something I'd seen in a dream but didn't find until I landed here," my friend Bernardo Bertucci shouts from the wheel of his Chris-Craft Corsair as we scud over the light chop along the island's Caribbean coast. A Calabrian who escaped a marketing career in New York's fashion industry, Bernardo arrived on Grenada ten years ago with modest ambitions to build a simple guesthouse. He says his ambitions didn't grow, but the blueprints for the guesthouse certainly did, into Laluna, a scattering of sixteen pastel-hued one-room villas on a hill overlooking an exquisite private ribbon of sand.

It's a perfect spring day, the sea is palest sapphire, and Bernardo, along with Wendy, his wife, and Charlie, one of their two young daughters, has found in me the perfect excuse to leave work behind and burn through a thousand dollars of fuel in his new boat.

We cruise past a new, modern resort and residential development going up in Prickly Bay, on the southernmost tip of Grenada, before pulling up at Hog Island, just off the national park that's home to the Grenada dove.

The only way to Hog Island is by boat, and the only thing on Hog Island is Roger's Bar, which is not much more than an overgrown lean-to facing an aquamarine bay but is where crowds of yachties and locals have converged for rum-soaked weekends for nearly twenty years. Like most of Grenada, it's a safe and quiet place where children play on the beach while their parents catch up on island gossip over a beer. But Roger doesn't hold a lease, and someday soon the Four Seasons will be going up right on the site of his bar. "They sent me an invitation to the ground-breaking ceremony," he tells us, holding out the card. "I haven't decided yet whether or not I'll go."