I knew it was only a matter of time before my mother sent her first text message.

She was the last holdout in our family – a family that still reads newspapers cover-to-cover and owns landline phones. One by one, we all got laptops and cell phones. We began e-mailing at first, then texting – all except my mom. So we bought her a flip phone, though she rarely remembered to turn it on. When she did remember, every few weeks, she’d discover old voicemails piled up – reminders to pick up the mail or the milk when she was down-Island, or to grab an extra bathing suit because someone didn’t pack one. Sometimes it seemed as though her total disinterest in her cell phone (and in ours) was due to the fact that we lived in Chilmark, a town that when I was growing up on the Vineyard in the 1980s and ’90s often felt like the place that technology forgot. And for good reason.

People have long come to the Vineyard to find escape. The summer set comes for vacation, to “get away from it all.” And many year-round residents also come searching for quiet and refuge. We move here in part to make lives that – separated from the mainland and the mainstream by ocean and sound – feel less crowded, slower paced, and with a bit more room for contemplation. Over the past few decades – even as more people everywhere bought personal computers, then laptops, installed wireless internet, and discovered they could not leave home without their cell phones – the Vineyard remained somewhat untouched. Cell service simply wasn’t reliable up-Island. The cable service providers told us that their cable and internet wires wouldn’t make it down our windy dirt roads. And so we left e-mail at the office. We powered down our cell phones at night. We put off buying computers. As a result, I like to think that our community felt a little less cluttered and busy than much of the world.

In our own house, my parents didn’t install the internet until after I left for college in the early 2000s, around the time that I got my first cell phone. Even then, cell service was spotty and returning home felt like an indulgence, a guilty pleasure. “There’s just no cell service there,” I’d say with a shrug as I gave roommates and friends the landline number, knowing full well that people my age would never use it.

But then, as tends to happen, things changed. In the mid 2000s, cell companies boosted coverage and people began finding pockets of service up-Island.

All of a sudden, it seemed, the constant chatter of the mainland had arrived. You saw lawyers walking up and down Lucy Vincent Beach taking calls on their cell phones, a sparkling ocean for backdrop rather than office walls. Cars idled by the Abel’s Hill Cemetery or in the Alley’s parking lot, their drivers breaking for the four-bar service. And in our own home, iPads and iPhones became regulars at the breakfast table on weekend mornings, next to mugs of coffee and newspapers.

The changes feel bittersweet. That stillness we all love about the Island is getting harder to find. That quiet and space for contemplation is rarer now. But there’s a sweetness to the increased communication, too – a quick call while I’m at my office in Boston from my dad about the gorgeous late summer corn at Morning Glory Farm, a picture snapped on a cell phone of a perfect Menemsha sunset, and now even an occasional text from my mother. The first one came last spring, on the day she was heading off-Island for hip replacement surgery.

Anxious about it, I shot my dad a text as I left work. A few minutes later, my phone lit up. But it was my mother’s number that flashed above the message.  

“I’m texting!” it read.

And then seconds later: “Weed.”

And a few minutes after that: “I meant Wee.”

The text made me laugh, a welcome bit of levity as I waited for my mother to head in for her first major surgery during my lifetime. And I felt grateful knowing that as she gets older – as they both do – I’ll be able to check in more easily, and they will too. That maybe the ocean between us won’t feel as wide.

“Look at you!” I wrote back. “But why are you texting me?”

“Dad’s drying,” came the response.

Followed two minutes later by: “I meant driving.”