14 Summers

I am in the midst of my fourteenth summer on Squirrel Island.  This makes me a relative newcomer; Ari has spent every one of his 32 summers here, and most families can count the generations who have summered on this tiny Maine island.  Still, I have enough history here to have transformed several times.

The first year I was here for just a week, unsure of my claim to the boy who brought me or to the Island itself.  But the next year we spent the whole summer together, and I proved my legitimacy by working at the Tea Shop, the little lunch place that is the Island’s only commercial enterprise.  Even now, if I sense I’m being dismissed as an outsider, I mention, “when I worked at the Tea Shop…” and watch the faces soften into acceptance.

For years, Squirrel Island was a place of indulgence.  We stayed up late, drinking on the rocks and counting shooting stars, stumbling into the cottage to make cookies at 2 am, then falling asleep to the sound of the waves just beyond our window.  We woke only when the smell of warm blueberry muffins lured us downstairs, and we found cappuccinos made just for us waiting on the porch.  Our days were filled with swimming off the SIBA dock, picnicking on Cunner Point, reading in the hammock, and smoking bowls in so many secret places that the Island sometimes feels like a map of places we did things we weren’t supposed to do.

I was a college kid, a young adult, and a girlfriend on Squirrel Island.  Ari slipped a diamond ring onto my finger under the stars on the South Shore, and I became a Squirrel Island bride.  Through it all, I walked barefoot on the rough sidewalks, made from a century-old recipe that includes helpings of sea glass and sand, and I soaked up the magic of this place. There are fairy houses and wildflowers and the sweetest raspberries you’ve ever tasted.  There are no cars or businesses here, no responsibilities or obligations.

Except that now there are.  Now I am a Squirrel Island mother, responsible for all of the needs of my two children, and also a Squirrel Island daughter-in-law, worrying about my ailing mother-in-law and struggling father-in-law.  Now being here is harder, in many ways, than being at home.  It’s hard to maintain the routines so crucial to our daily life, hard to share space with three generations of extended family, and hard to accept the loss of what Squirrel Island used to be to me.  I don’t read much here, I don’t get out on the rocks at night, I wake to the cries of my baby, not the smell of muffins, and I haven’t smoked a bowl in more than four years.

It is a loss, and I feel it deeply.  But the hole it leaves is being filled with a different kind of magic.  Because my children love it here.  At three and a half, Tessa has enough memory of her summers on Squirrel Island that she talks about it all winter long.  She thinks about the Cove and the Fairy Forest and ordering her own ice cream at the Tea Shop.  She looks forward to going barefoot everywhere and to picking blueberries with her Poppy.  She sorts her sea glass and plans on collecting more.  And when she’s here, she is in heaven.

Squirrel Island is a magical place to be a child.  It is a safe place, a wild and exciting place where children are free to explore and dream and breathe in a different world.  My life on Squirrel Island started when I was 18, but now I get to experience what it’s like to be three here.  Now, when I pick raspberries and blackberries, I don’t even want to eat them; I would much rather tell Tessa to close her eyes and open her mouth, and watch the joy spread across her face as she tastes them.   Now I get to listen to the stories she tells her baby brother, stories about the things she did when she was a baby on Squirrel Island, and the things their Daddy did when he was little on Squirrel Island.  Now I get to give this place and this feeling and this indulgence to Tessa and Calder.  And I am lucky, and grateful.

Life changes so incrementally at home.  Here, where I can line up my fourteen summers, it’s easier to read the balance sheet of losses and gains.  It’s easier to see that the trades never come out evenly, because they are completely different.  And it’s the surprise of those differences that makes the losses bearable, and the gains so sweet.