The Island

Sometimes when you’re glum—when both the weather and your mood has been grey for weeks, it’s hard to be able to know what might make you feel better. There’s a tendency to lose perspective, to forget that this is a temporary state and there are things you can do for yourself to help shake it off. The fact that you’re in a new city makes this all worse—you don’t know where to go, what to do to take care of your now sad spirit.

You forget that a roadtrip, a new adventure might make it better.

The day you head to the island is clear and not raining, it feels bouncy and (dare you say it?) spring like. You see the very first crocus blooming in your yard as you walk to the car, this can only be a good sign.

Heading north you miss the exit you need to take because you are attempting to shoot a quick photo of the oh-so-puffy clouds. You end up going off in wrong directions trying to turn around but you laugh, you don’t care. Roadtrips are not always about the destination, they’re more often about what you find along the way.



You turn off the important, educational, but always slightly worrisome NPR radio station you’ve been listening to for months and troll the airwaves looking for something light and pop-y. The woes of the world can wait for a day; today you want happy, carefree.

You miss the ferry you had intended to take, but you don’t care about that either. In the parking lot you call a faraway friend, expecting to leave a message but instead she answers and you chat like two magpies. You are going through similar things, states apart, and there is laughter and communion as you recognize and relate to each other’s struggle. That’s what’s been missing these past few months—the comfort of companionship.

When at last the ferry pushes away from the dock you feel as if your heart has taken flight. The wind in your hair, the cry of shorebirds, the fact that you are outside and not wearing a jacket—it is the best kind of delicious. The day feels juicy, your mood is toe-tapping, you feel like you want to giggle on the inside. And you are deeply grateful, more than you can say; it has been a very long time.



Your tires roll off the ferry and onto a new island, one you’ve never been to before, and you wriggle in pleasure. This place is terra incognito for you. Such things wake up the traveler in you, the adventurer, the most generous, fearless, open part of your soul. This part of you never really goes away, but sometimes it goes dormant, damped down by wet newspaper layers of worry and fear and self-consciousness that leave you wondering if you really are the person who has done all the adventurous things you've done in your life (who was that girl, where has she gone?). This small exploration, this sole act of going to a new island makes you feel like you really are yourself again, heir to your own history. You're back in your skin at last, glad to be there.

The real reason you’re on the island is an errand, something to be picked up. Along with your missed ferry you’ve missed the window of opportunity you intended to retrieve the package and now must wait until the afternoon. When you realize this you decide to backtrack, to take pictures of the adorable red farmhouse and impressive barn collection that you passed on the road out. The street you pull off to turn around is named Serendipity Lane. You will realize the significance of this later; at the moment you find it simply charming.

You make your way back, on country roads. The island is filled with small roads, that very Washington type of rural road with their rise and fall. You remember someone once telling you that these rollercoaster roads were formed by the glaciers when they receded at the end of the ice age. You love the image of the last icy fingers of the glacier raking the land into furrows, leaving valleys and islands and lakes in its wake.



You pass filtered views, the colors are still wintery, everything muted, but you know it’s only a matter of weeks now (okay, perhaps a month) before things bust out bright and green. Today is the first day you feel confident that spring will indeed come. Somewhere in the darkness of winter you had lost your faith but it's back now, a small green shoot putting down roots.



You coast down a hill and bring the car to a stop opposite the farmhouse you want to photograph. When you look up you are surprised to see, right in front of your car, a 'For Rent' sign with your name on it.



Is it a sign? (well, obviously it is a sign, but is it a sign?) Aren’t you the girl who, just days ago, was trying to figure out where her life was going? Perhaps this unlikely message is your answer. Perhaps your future lies down this dirt driveway, in a small white house with a front porch.



The hair on the back of your neck prickles a little bit as you sit there and wonder what to do. Should you check it out? Should you ignore it and continue on with your life as planned? (it is a bit frightening, to be honest). What might lie in wait for you down the driveway that passes open meadows and curves around to a house set among trees?

You decide that you have to find out. If you don’t, you’ll always wonder.

The man mowing the lawn (on a riding lawnmower, there’s that much lawn to deal with) doesn’t know anything about the house. You’ll have to call the management company he tells you, but when you ask if you can look in the windows he nods easily. “Sure, have a look around,” he says and rides off on the mower.

You pass two rosebushes on your way up to the houses. They are bare of leaves now, old and gnarled, but you imagine they’ll have old-fashioned fragrant roses in the summer. The house you grew up in had roses like that. When the house was sold you nearly asked to have a clause put into the contract that said you could come back and take cuttings of the bushes to plant in your yard when you bought a home of your own. You knew even then that you’d be missing those roses for the rest of your life.

You pass a planter filled with daffodils, about to break out into joyous yellow bloom.



There’s an old and rusty wood stove planted in the yard like a decoration. This too reminds you of the wood stove that sat in the kitchen in the house where you grew up. You remember dressing for school in front of the stove in the winter, the kitchen always far warmer than your bedroom, and cooking dinner there when the electricity went out during heavy rainstorms. Just before the house was sold you claimed that stove, unwilling to let such a piece of family history slip away. It now sits in storage, hoping to be repurposed some day.



There is a garden here too, a few beds just waiting to be put to good use. Looking at them your fingers practically itch to begin planting. You imagine vegetables and herbs, flowers and berries. It’s just about the right size for a beginning gardener such as yourself.



There are fruit trees round the side of the house, venerable looking. You imagine baskets filled with apples in the fall, maybe even plums. You can practically see the jars of jam and fruit butter you might make, crumbles and pies, pots and pots of applesauce.



There is a wooden swing attached to a tree, and several birdhouses tucked up in the branches. One is made out of a mailbox. It makes you smile.



You imagine barbeques here in this yard, canning parties in the fall. There would be a hammock hung from one of the trees, and picnics on the grass. This is the perfect place for the dog you keep dreaming of getting. Your nieces would love it here too, they’d run in the meadow, swing on the swings, maybe even climb a tree. They’d have all the pleasures you had growing up in the country.

Wandering around the yard you realize something you’re known deep inside you all along, you are not a city girl. You can do it, sure, enjoy it even; but in your heart you yearn for the sort of life you grew up with, a life of fresh air and spring flowers and meadows and rivers and gardens and woods out back. This is the sort of life you want, the sort of place you want to live. You’re not sure if everyone yearns to return to their roots at one point or another, but you do. You do, now.

The house too reminds you of your childhood. It’s funky in the way some country houses are, added to inelegantly over the years. The floor in the living room is an ugly carpet, not the wood you would hope for. The kitchen is a mish-mosh of awkward improvements of different vintages, but there is a view from the window over the kitchen sink that looks out at meadows and a stand of trees and the light glinting off the water in the distance.



There’s a laundry room/mud room off the kitchen and you know immediately this is where you would make your office. You’d have the same lovely view, with the bonus of being able to smell when the pot you had simmering on the stove began to burn. You’ve been saying for years that you want an office adjacent to your kitchen. Could this be it?

But it’s on an island, an island where you know no one. Would your friends ever come to visit? Would your brother and sister-in-law, who haven’t been this far away from their house since they had kids three years ago, brave a ferry ride? After a winter of feeling isolated and lonely in Seattle, is moving to an island really a good idea? Your life is currently stretched between two places, should you really consider adding a third? And what about living by yourself down a long dirt driveway in the country, the closest neighbor not even within shouting distance? (you’ve got plenty of courage, but you also have an over-active imagination).

The fact that the closest neighbor has goats—and, what’s more, baby goats—does make it rather tempting, however.



The fact that you could walk to this beach…



passing views like this…



all that goes in the pro side of the pro/con list you’re already making in your head. Should you? Should you move to this island? It seems at once crazy and utterly right.

As you explore the island further you find other delights: the largest, most wonderful old barn (you’re a closet barn aficionado, have been for years). The island is littered with barns, but this one is the most splendid. You are instantly in love (yes, with a barn; it happens).



You peek inside the barn, looking down the row of old stables and peering up into the haymow. In a strange way it reminds you of a church, a nave. This barn is a tribute to hard and honorable work, the care and feeding of a family, of a community. Though these days it's possible not to acknowledge it, agriculture is the foundation of us all. What could be more elemental, more sacred?



The island has plenty of lures for you, more than its share of charms—it seems to be calling you. You find another sign with your name on it—a road, with three houses on it for sale, but they are all modern houses and none tickle your fancy the way the little white house set among meadows did.



It is then that you begin to realize that perhaps this is not a literal sign that you must move to this island and live in that white house (because, really, you’re not exactly ready for it, you know that). Perhaps it is a signpost, pointing to the life that you want to lead, a reminder of the path that suits you best. After all, you had been asking where your life was heading.

At sunset you find a beach, it is rocky and rugged like Pacific Northwest beaches are.



Littered with timber, bleached white like bone.



Down the shore a fisherman casts into a sea of pink.



Even the stones reflect the sunset.



You feel your worries, the clouds of the past few months, swept away by an ocean of orange. There are small waves lapping at the shore. It is not the waves you are used to—true ocean waves that crash and froth (you were born in Big Sur, after all). These waves are gentle little things, but the sound is relaxing, hypnotic. It is the sound of your own heartbeat, lost these past months.



And the sun sinks behind the Olympics, into the ocean, ending a day of wonder.



Later that night, while driving back to the ferry, you pass a house —a little red farmhouse. There is smoke coming out the chimney and a warm glow in the windows. There's a barn behind the house, and a pond too, and the house is old, with the grace and good proportions of age worn well. You're sure it must have wooden floors inside.

But most of all there is a feeling, a sense of warmth and comfort that to you means home. You may not know the exact route to get there yet, but that feeling is what you are going for. You'll know when you see it where you're meant to be; you no longer have any doubt that you'll be able to recognize home.

The ferry pulls away, leaving the island behind and taking you back to the mainland.



What does any of this have to do with food? Admittedly, not much. But it is a reminder, a sign. Someday I am going to cook in a kitchen with a garden just out the door. Someday I am going to make jam from the fruit of my own trees. Somewhere there is a little country house that someday will be my home. I'll know it when I see it.