Two years ago, recently retired from teaching in upstate New York, my husband and I decided to move to Martha’s Vineyard to a house we had owned for ten years. Sometime during that ten years, one of us fell in love with the Island and wanted more and more to consummate this passion by moving in permanently. That one was not I. The Vineyard was fine in the summer, but to live here year around? It took me a long time to even think it might work. Perhaps I should have lashed my impassioned mate to our mahogany newel post and hoped the madness would pass, but I did not. So the house was sold, the moving company was found, and soon we were driving east toward the Atlantic Ocean to learn for the first time in thirty years what it was like to be new. 
I thought I was prepared.
    
When I came in the summer, the Island felt like a wonderful beach resort with quirky, endearing ways to be cherished and bragged about when you returned home. We were never here long enough to make friends. It takes a long time to make new friends, perhaps longer in New England. People are careful with their friendship. They know it is a valuable commodity and not to be dispensed carelessly. I understand this.
    
But I am now past middle age and fully formed – warts and all. Can I adjust? Do I want to? Join organizations, said well-meaning friends. Having never had time during my years of raising kids, teaching, and writing to join anything, I decided to give it a try. I started with tennis and gardening, both things I like to do. How weird it was to remember what it felt like to be eleven years old, the new kid in class, looking over a sea of unfamiliar faces, waiting to be chosen for the kickball team. And I learned something I had forgotten: that hurt produces anger, anger that is then squashed deep inside. I did not remember feeling angry when I was eleven or twelve or thirteen but that anger was there, waiting to be recognized.
    
Well, when I looked at it, it was not a pretty sight, and soon turned out to be highly combustible. Here I was, a retired person in a beautiful new home, feeling I wanted to do nothing but trash the place. I told anyone who would listen how much I hated everything, particularly in winter. Going away was not the solution. I always had to come back to the empty streets, unlit houses, and closed stores. They became painful reminders of a childhood spent bumping from place to place against the background of World War II. The heaving winter sea invokes a stormy wartime crossing on a small freighter, the crash of breaking crockery, the smell of seasickness. And all this peace and quiet of beach, dune, and woods does not make me feel safe; it feels like abandonment.
    
For me, this Island is haunted by the empty resorts of my childhood that we passed through during and after the war. When I was thirteen, my mother, sister, and I were alone in Estoril, a 
resort outside Lisbon where we owned a house. From the upstairs balcony, you could see the same Atlantic Ocean. Our friends had gone; my mother became very ill and believed she was dying. That feeling of being utterly alone has never left me. Perhaps it is the Vineyard’s resemblance to Europe with its small village shops, its tree-lined roads running beside the same ocean, that summons my ghosts. They do not yet trust this place.

Originally broadcast on WCAI and WNAN, the Cape and Islands NPR stations.