Moving to Boston shortly after college, I felt like a party crasher. I was ready to mingle, but no heads turned my way. After two years of running, writing, and joining volunteer groups, I rarely had coffee with a new friend. With so many twenty-somethings moving through the city, I guess it was hard to know who to invest in.
When the nonprofit I worked for closed unexpectedly, my long-distance boyfriend, Reid, who lived on Martha’s Vineyard, helped me pack. I left Boston the same way I had found it: no neighbors taking any notice.
I felt both nervous and optimistic as the ferry delivered us to Reid’s Island home, where we’d met five years earlier as lifeguards on South Beach in Edgartown. The freight boat’s whistle announced our arrival in Vineyard Haven on a dank March afternoon. As we made the half-mile drive to his in-town rental, we passed our favorite breakfast spot, The Black Dog, and his new makeshift engineering office, more like a closet, off Main Street. I smiled. I had always liked the Island’s small-town Americana feel.
Later that evening, as I tore tape from the moving boxes and added my novels to the bookshelf Reid’s father had made, I lamented what I’d left behind: career options, arts and culture, airport access. Sitting on his – now our – dusty linoleum floor, I hung onto his promises: We’d take winter beach walks and host fireside dinner parties.
During those early weeks, the mixed-up March weather, with its hints of summer and winter, mirrored my feelings of how life on the Island was going to be.
As it was the pre–social networking era, I began calling all the Vineyarders I had ever met – even a friend of the woman I had nannied for ten years earlier – to announce my arrival and solicit help with finding a job. Some were generous enough to grant me informational interviews and provide references.
I also planned a surprise thirtieth birthday party for Reid. Faces, many Reid had known since pre-preschool, crowded into the Portuguese American Club in Oak Bluffs on a warm April evening to wish us both well. Friends with jobs like excavating, fishing, gardening, and nursing, along with his grandparents, parents, and brother, toasted Reid. I was struck by the mix of ages and lifestyles in his circle.
As the Island slowly transitioned into spring, I lived with heightened awareness, noticing the crocuses in bloom and how friendly the cashier at the hardware store was, as if the Vineyard was offering me some kind of ninety-day money-back guarantee.
I found work as a substitute teacher, and the tiny class sizes and progressive teaching methods impressed me. The Island dress code of sundresses and flip-flops made me feel my best. I mused that subbing on the Vineyard might be easier because of the possibility of conferencing with an unruly student’s parent later in the day at Cronig’s Market.
In the evenings, when Reid might be off to play volleyball, hockey, or even darts, I wondered if the Island was big enough for me. Just to see, I signed up for yoga and watercolor classes. Going to classes at the funky old cottage at Featherstone Center for the Arts in Oak Bluffs made me feel like this was a place I wanted to put down roots.
As Reid and I ran together over the drawbridge and around the Chops, I imagined us being photographed in an aerial shot for a “Rave Run” in Runner’s World magazine. I couldn’t believe this was our everyday route.
After a run one Saturday, Reid’s surfing buddy called to ask us out on a double date. Gradually barbecues, date nights, and even Island theater began filling our calendar. As the oaks budded, on the precipice of summer, I felt the Island, Reid, and I – we three – were transitioning from a summer romance to a love affair. Of course summer was the season I knew well on the Island, so then it was easy to feel at home.
Come fall, I began teaching middle-school English. There was enough energy at school to keep a girl warm through the off-season. I was constantly learning more than I taught and was excited when new colleagues asked me to join their book club.
A surprise came over Christmas vacation: When we finally did take that winter walk along Lucy Vincent Beach, Reid paused near the rugged, majestic shoreline to give me a diamond ring that our new friend Sarah at CB Stark Jewelers had helped him select.
All at once, I was propelled into adulthood. Scoping out houses became the new hobby. Then Reid discovered we could build a home on his family’s land in West Tisbury. The idea of living in the woods made me feel half dreamy and half as if I were about to star in a horror movie. I was disappointed to learn the only store I could walk to from the property was a lumberyard. Reid promised we could move if it didn’t work out.
Now that we’re settled into the house that Reid built (which is mostly finished) with our three-year-old son, Owen, living on the Vineyard has never felt more right. While Island life is seldom easy, the Island has seemed to know just what to offer me as I keep growing and changing.
Although we have less time for our former leisure activities, I adore how woods encircle our raucous toddler-friendly barbecues and offer wildlife sightings on a daily basis. On stroller walks through the neighborhood, Owen delights in the up-close rumble of the lumberyard’s big rigs and the chance to feed bread to the cows at the farm behind it.
On my runs, now usually solo, I climb gradual hills, bordered with steadfast beetlebung trees and rustic stone walls. When passing Seth’s Pond, I think of the times we have kayaked, ice skated, and swum there, and feel excited about taking Owen trout fishing and paddle boarding. When I hang out with my girlfriends for laid-back gatherings such as clothes swaps, beach dates, and uniquely delicious potlucks, I get a buzz that lasts longer than one from sitting in the front row at a Broadway show.
A favorite family activity, the Martha’s Vineyard Film Festival in Chilmark, lets us catch a creative children’s show and eat a locally grown meal, sharing the journey of parenthood with familiar faces. I have the feeling many of us are raising our children with similar Henry David Thoreau–like values, such as appreciating our surroundings and living richly by living simply. I am glad that even though our lives bring constant change, we are still connected, grinning a greeting at the post office or willing to help each other with a project on a Saturday.
Sure, some winter days can feel as dark and dreary as an Edgar Allan Poe poem, and the occasional cancelled ferry can make me shriek, but these flashes are outweighed by the Island’s eclectic charm, by its natural beauty, and, most significantly, by the vibrant life my family is building here together.
I made a fantastic trade eight and a half years ago, not knowing that shedding the conveniences of faceless urban life would allow me the chance to bump along on a hayride at Morning Glory Farm’s Pumpkin Festival in Edgartown with my Island friends, year after year, drunk on clean autumnal air, gazing with joy at my glowing, growing pumpkin of a son.
