Four years ago, I dismantled my life in New York and headed to a place where I knew no one.

By Noelle Hancock

There is a chicken in my shower. It's 8:30 a.m., I've just sat down on the toilet to pee. I casually glance around and there it is, drinking some of the residual water puddled on my shower floor. This is not the first creature to make an appearance in my bathroom. Since I moved to the Caribbean, I've had spirited encounters with tarantulas, scorpions, and untold lizards. But the chicken got me thinking.

"How did you get here?" I ask the bird. It blinks unhelpfully back at me. Perhaps a better question is, how did I get here? How did I come to live on a tiny, rustic island of 4,100 people sharing a bathroom with poultry?