For four months of the year, I ghost my land bound self. The moment I step off the Block Island ferry, my nervous system resets. I cast off the junkie shakes of fomo, the residue of the winter’s excessive doom-scrolling drying like dew. I slip into the mothball-scented souvenir shop shirts I’d left last summer, and dive into the indifferent arms of the natural world. Self-exiled on this extraordinary island, its contours and its details essentially unchanged every year I arrive, I reckon only with the weeds that overtook the garden, the shifting sun and shadows, the white noise of bees, and the winds that decide which beach to walk. I cross the starlit lawn at night to the garage and flick on my desk lamp. Settling in at my bench, I sort my tools, wipe the rust from my steel block and exhale. A potent blend of gratitude, guilt and ache follows me: I long for my mother to see the island’s beauty again, to see me here at this bench, proof of living, loving and honoring what she bequeathed, to trust my stewardship of the land she loved most of all.
