“Why can’t you live in Alaska?”

That’s what Kay’s dermatologist asks her with annoying regularity. But despite removal of at least a dozen skin cancers (and half her bottom lip), Kay and her husband continue to live on Eleuthera, where the Bahamian government promises 300 days of sunshine a year.

Kay loves the tranquility of her island home, even though she rarely has electricity, water, phone, and cable at the same time. Three out of four is a good day indeed. (Maybe she shouldn’t even count the phone; sometimes weeks can go by before she makes or receives a call.)

She goes to great lengths to avoid inside chores like cleaning or cooking. So she works in the yard, washes windows, and paints while her husband does the grocery shopping and food prep. The role reversal works nicely, even though it confounds some of their Bahamian friends.

Driving a poppy-red pick-up, sporting work boots, and wielding a machete, Kay often hunts in the bush for native plants. She’s a little more careful these days, after having been caught on video camera “tiefing” (uh, stealing) plants from the yard of a home she thought was abandoned.

Gardening is her passion (aside from three grandsons stateside), but for fun she’s also been known to watch ants and converse with her pet curly-tailed lizard, who stops by the screened porch every morning for his share of her granola bar.

(And she isn’t sun-stupid. Despite residing on a pink sand Atlantic beach, she does appease her doctor by wearing a perpetual coating of SPF 60 sunscreen.)