from here and from away

This conflict is always on the table. The pull between the home that is here and the home that is not.

Almost everything about Islesford is a time stamp. It is a place that is so absolutely unto itself that very little translates from here to anywhere else. We tend the part of ourselves that lives on this island, those of us who make up the summer colonies, for just one season a year. Or, for our family, one stretch of weeks within a month within a season. Within a year. Freddy’s small frame sitting on the long bench at the table, both built by his great-grandfather, is so much bigger than it was last summer when he sat there and so incomprehensibly smaller than it will be next year. This place is at once frozen in time and also marks our passage one year to the next. God forbid we miss a year.

We mark heights here, in the door jam between the kitchen and the bunk bed room, in the nook where the land line lives. There are heights on there from back in the 60s, just after the house was completed. My children’s childhoods crawl up the wall, along with so many of their Smith-Newlin kin. We forgot to mark Eider last year and the loss I feel at that is particular. For someone who is so attached to not missing much, that lapse stings. We stopped marking Moo five years or more ago when she reached her height. Like many things, there is no telling when that last mark will be made. You arrive back the following year and discover there is no need for a new one. The time for that sort of growing has simply passed.

Some years are easier and more fun than others on this island. Of course that is the way. The summer weeks form their own sort of distillation of the rest of the year. Some years are great. Some are difficult. This one has been so hard, and even though Islesford offers some respite, it also tends to make stark how far off the mark I am inside myself. It is uncomfortable to come upon myself in this way. Forced to look without the daily routines and obligations to distract me from what I see. I have always seen the time here as an opportunity to reassess and determine how to move forward from what I am learning within this year’s particular flexion point. But some years, recalibration is too difficult an ask, and grief is all I can manage. This year is that.

We head home to Vermont tomorrow once the boat that the kids have built this summer is launched. I am ready to go home. There are so many loose ends that need managing around our place this time of year. Two of the pullets I raised this spring wandered off and disappeared this week, which leaves me acutely aware of how difficult it is to tend the spaces and creatures in my care from any sort of distance. Not to mention the garden. Please, do not mention the garden. I am ready to return, if not just for my responsibilities, but also for the break from considering myself so hard as I do here. I hate leaving. Of course I do. Life here is this strange, perfect simplicity. How can it not be when my only form of transport for weeks at a time is my feet or my bike, or every odd day or so, the golf cart? I hate to say goodbye. To the island, to summer friends, to family we seldom see, to the parts of myself and my family that are built around the primary pillars of a reverence for childhood and nature, and that which is at once timeless and also fleeting.

This conflict is always on the table. The pull between the home that is here and the home that is not. I know once I leave, shortly after that last backward glance at the dock as the boat speeds across the harbor to Northeast, that it will pass. And only the work and pleasure, that funny mix, of our Vermont home will be most of what is on my mind. But this transition drags a bit. I spend a few days both here and there.

The culture on the island has a particular and insidious tick around always asking how long you are here for this summer. I wrote about this measure last summer as well. Maybe the summer before, too? And before that. Backward in time across yet another measure. It is funny how ingrained this is. More time means how lucky you must be. Less time, and how sad for you. I am not a fan of this dichotomy. It suggests too much that our home away from here is some how less than. That our preference is here. I struggle with that. For this is only 3 weeks. At most, 6. That cannot be enough to live the whole year for, can it?

I will concede that I have not had as much fun this year as in other summers. Last year’s was certainly one of them. But I am not really in it for that and besides, Freddy had a marvelous summer here for someone who is near to six. As he is the only one whose time I can truly influence anymore, this in itself feels like success and satisfies me. I trust my return, which is naive, I know, so completely that I am happy to simply try again next summer. The invitation is already out there. Written in an ink I mistake for permanent. I have sworn not to break the news if you don’t.

Islesford goes on and on throughout time and across generations. This family, the one that invited me in to make it my own, is woven thick through not just the floorboards but out into the blueberries and roses, across the rocks and tide, tangled into fishing line and lobster traps. We are here. Even when we are not. And perhaps that is the heart of it, these parts of life that are so different in many ways, but not separate. A part of the same complicated whole, in which two things can be true at once. Even as they rub against each other in seeming opposition.

And then, inside the tug of opposites, the most perfect Islesford day unfolds. And the most typical. I taught yoga to a group of folks inside an old converted barn, rowed out for a picnic on a float with Freddy and Chris. Paddled out to the Sea Sauna and sweat and swam and sweat and swam on repeat. And then Lobster Shack lunch with all its surprising yet predictable socializing, everyone that we had no plans to run into yet delight at the timing together. Second cousins and psychedelic back to the earth industrious art hounds. Fishermen and fishermen and fishermen. We zipped to the playground to the beach to the dock and back and forth over and over and over again. Full end of Islesford summer soak up with these forever friends who also have big and complete lives elsewhere that I know little to nothing about, and yet here we are, year after year, this strange yet abiding pocket community. Friends with folks whose great-grandparents once picnicked together on these same beaches, too. How does anyone make sense of time and place when these are some of the parameters?

The summer community is what it is. Island folk of a sort. From here and from away both. It can be true even inside my own conflict. I think it is my own, but perhaps not. Maybe if I weren’t always trying to make so much sense of time, all the parts of myself could just throw her head back and laugh and laugh and laugh. Across the sea, back to the Green Mountains and another perfect home. In which I either struggle to find myself, or feel my fullness everywhere.