For 12 years, my family has spent a week on the same property in Downeast Maine. In mid-June, with summer draped lazily before us, we travel east along Route 1 and bear right after Bucksport. Time seems to slow as we cross Deer Isle Bridge singing, “Hi, Deer Isle.” As if on cue, above the causeway, an osprey clutching a fish beats a steady rhythm toward its nest atop the utility pole. As far as we’re concerned, it’s the same osprey, same unlucky fish, year after year.
Winding along Sunshine Road, our children grow crazed with anticipation. We keep the windows up so we can be struck drunk by the scent of low tide when we finally leap from the car at Sunshine House. The kids race up the wooded path to the fairies and mermaids left behind by their younger selves during past visits. The two-room main house is simple, with large windows facing the ocean. The four sleeping cabins are recessed in the forest, among the spruces and firs, birches and moss-covered rocks. Barefoot, we pad to them each evening, blindly stepping over familiar roots to flop, salty, into bed with hemlock needles on our feet.
There is a predictability and sameness to the days and week that we relish. We take the “Rock Walk,” exploring tidal pools and scraping our knees, which will sting as we wade to harvest seaweed for mermaid wigs. My kids curl up in my parents’ laps on the deck while watching the sun and seals rise from the sea. A dozen years in, and the view is unchanged, save for the staghorn sumac beyond the deck, now growing into my peripheral vision. We use “Big Rock” as a diving board at high tide and as wind block for s’mores-roasting fires at low tide. Each day, regardless of the weather, we plunge into the frigid water and emerge exhilarated, cleansed of sins and relieved of the burden of bathing. We kayak to and circumnavigate “Little Island.” Sight and sign of deer prompt the repeated conversation about when and why they brave the crossing.
For all the sameness, there is change, and this setting is a merciless metronome, punctuating the passage of time and youth, years like quarter notes. The walk to the point, once impossible for my children, is now impossible for my father. Parkinson’s disease has robbed him, a once-exceptional athlete, of the necessary balance. Leaving him behind is unbearable. So, he and I now bike around to the point (even this is a treacherous journey for him) and watch the kids approach, navigating the rocks with agility. What time has given them, it has taken from my father. I think he will never again experience the camaraderie of a group plunge, the exquisitely private and electrifying moment under the surface before rejoining the world, itself electrified with gasps and giggles and bodies flailing toward shore.
The story of aging is as old as time, but I hear it most clearly here, where the horizon and coast appear steady and cast our change in stark relief. The white-throated sparrow’s passion for its neighbor to the north (“Oh, Can-a-da, da, da”) is undiminished, while some of my passions wane and my horizons narrow. This year, I realized with sadness that I no longer daydream about the novel I would write if I had a summer alone at Sunshine House. Now, I wouldn’t want a summer here without my family. I deeply dread the year we arrive an adventurer down, a parent deceased or a child fledged.
I wonder about my father’s perspective on it all. Each time we kayak toward the island, my father stands waving from the deck. I imagine he feels we are leaving him high and dry with his own mortality. Last year, the two of us shared a quiet hour on the deck, holding hands over the arms of our Adirondack chairs. I fought back tears wondering, as I assumed he was, how much more time we had here together in this place. At last, he began to speak, “Do you suppose,” and I thought, Here we go, diving in to the depths of human experience and connection, before he continued with a nod toward a distant lobster boat, “that’s a two-stroke engine?” While I was contemplating love and loss, he was contemplating torque and revolutions per minute.
This year, during our final day at Sunshine House, we asked my father if he’d like to try paddling to the island in a double kayak with my husband. It wasn’t without risk, but, always the adventurer, he was game. He required help getting into the boat but was soon afloat: low in the water, among the jumping mackerel, with the perspective of the cormorants.
I stood in the spot from which I had shoved the boats out to sea, my submerged feet numb with cold. I watched my husband, parents, and children paddling alongside one another in this special place and felt intense gratitude for our fortune in knowing it and loving it, together.