There is Here

On a U.S. map, up in the continent’s northeast corner, Deer Isle looks like a mere speck – as though a crumb or stray coffee ground was dropped onto the page. It’s an unlikely tethering point for a life-long Midwesterner, a gal born to a flat, land-locked landscape of geometrically-gridded streets, brick bungalows and small, tidy yards barely hinting at old wind-scoured prairies. An island in the Atlantic may seem an even more surprising choice for someone who doesn’t swim well and is transformed to a welter of thumbs aboard a boat. To this part of the world, my family never traveled. I possessed no claims, no connections or ties. Yet, inexplicably, as though I’d been pulled to it like iron shavings to a magnet or driven by a wind of unknown origin at my back, I arrived on this 12-by-12 mile granite-bound island 15 years ago. 

I came to a place I’d never seen, as if drawn by a memory older than me. A place that had yet to offer me its stories, about which I’d not yet learned any of its names. A place that, it’s not inaccurate to say, claimed me.

I came home to a place where I’d never been. 

The needles of my inner compass still point here. Each spring, like an osprey on its annual migration, I return to the island. In late May’s buzz-and-hum march toward solstice, toward warmer nights and lengthening days, I arrive as yellow school buses chug a few final laps, as lobster traps are stacked onto pickups and buoys get a fresh coat of paint, when cold frames are opened and lawn furniture and grills are hauled from cellar or shed.    

Over the years and in other seasons, often from a far off 1,300 mile perspective, I’ve become more certain we each have an instinctual need for connection to a human and natural world community, some distinct place about which we have intimate knowledge and where we feel best able to live our individual lives. We each need a “belonging-place.” Deer Isle is mine.

In Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot wrote: “Home is where one starts from.” It’s also where I arrive. Come late May, what all winter was there is now here.