I am leaving, moving off-Island. For good. A new home, a new town, a new state. I have, in a sense, been voted off the Island by the myriad of issues and inconveniences so familiar to those of us who call this place home — our only home — the one we struggle mightily for year after year to pay the rent, or if we’re really lucky, the mortgage. The home that is our entire world. Where we reside alone, or with partners, family and/or friends, and perhaps a few children and pets. Where we gather to mark a multitude of beginnings and endings: holidays, birthdays, first and last days of school, marriages, divorces, births, and deaths.
The house I’m leaving is my children’s childhood home, though all three are grown and flown. It is the last one visited by my parents, one shared over the years with several very special cats and dogs, six of whom are buried in the yard, along with a small army of deserving woodland creatures. I won’t dwell on the various reasons for leaving, how much harder it’s grown to call this Island home. Those of us who do it understand all too well that we can’t help ourselves. We love this place; we are in love with this place.
Driving home from my last oh-so-precious Island dentist appointment recently, I passed through the heart of West Tisbury: horses in the barnyard, sheep in the meadow, swans on the Mill Pond. But it was a field of mowed, rolled hay that reduced me to tears. We moved here during haying. Later one child would participate in this tradition on a friend’s farm; another spent days and years at the FARM Institute, leading to a sustainable agriculture major in college. But that first year, those carefully rolled bales of hay were foreign to our suburban sensibility.
We fell easily into the rhythm of the Vineyard seasons, the knowledge that the ocean was never far away — scents of sand and salt wafting through car windows on errands, the crashing of Long Point waves serenading us on stormy nights, the distant moan of the ferry stretching all the way to our yard when the wind is just right.
Every inch of this Island is crammed with memories. Once upon a time I got engaged on the East Chop bluffs, toppled a canoe with my father on Lake Tashmoo, spent a week aboard the Alabama with my daughter’s fifth-grade class. Several times a week I frequent the West Tisbury Post Office, where one child tore open their college letter of acceptance, or I drive through the intersection where another wrecked the family car, pass the schools that were once as familiar to me as my own backyard. Over the years I have attended an endless array of concerts, dance recitals, school plays, and Minnesinger shows at the MVRHS PAC. My kids traveled off-Island for school sports and class trips. They received their high school diplomas at the historic Tabernacle in the Oak Bluffs Campground. When your children grow up on an Island, their coaches, teachers, and childhood friends are never strangers. They’ve remained a gratifying part of my life long after my kids settled off-Island. I run into them in the grocery store, at cookouts, on the boat.
And speaking of the boat, what will I do without the endless nautical drama? Will it run; will there be delays? Don’t forget to check the wind, the weather report. Do I need to leave a day (or two or three) before my actual plans? Should I book a hotel, just in case? What if my kids don’t make it home for Christmas, or my birthday, or my mother’s memorial? What if we are stranded on the other side?
There will be adjustments, learning to appreciate summer days without the Island traffic, the crowds, the (mostly) enraptured faces of (mostly) grateful tourists. What will winter be like without wave-battered, windswept beaches, or gray Island days made brighter by coworkers and patrons at the West Tisbury library, or cozy dinners around a bonfire with my dog park gang? What could possibly compare to a brisk winter walk on Lucy or Moshup, the feeling that my dog and I are not just the only ones on the beach, but perhaps the last remaining beings in the entire world?
There is much we relinquish, choosing life on an Island, most of it willingly. In turn, we are rewarded in ways others can only imagine. What DO we do here all winter, that mysterious stretch of time between Labor Day and Memorial Day weekends, cut off from the mainland, surrounded by the sea? Muddle through long dark days, consumed with loneliness and despair? Live ordinary lives, surrounded by extraordinary beauty? Indulge in magic and mayhem?
I’ll never tell.
I recently came across a postcard my grandmother sent while vacationing here more than 50 years ago. The front features a predictably stunning photo of the Aquinnah Cliffs, and on back she writes, in her flowing, old-school cursive: “This place is so beautiful, too bad it’s so inaccessible.” Still true, even today. But that difficulty is no doubt part of its allure.
I am heartbroken to leave. But those hay bales reminded me that the world is filled with places of unexpected beauty and serenity, and though they may not be on the Vineyard, I am determined to find one or two new ones to call my own.
Many moons ago I was captured — enraptured — by this place. When I go, I leave behind a piece of my heart. But this Island is part of me now. I’ll carry it with me the rest of my life.
And I wouldn’t have had it any other way.
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