Oak Bluffs, MVY

We arrived on to Martha's Vineyard after spending a night at our friend's house in Jamaica Plain. My friend, one of my closest from Graduate School, has just signed a deal to publish his first young adult novel with Bloomsbury Press. We spent two years having dinner together once a week, sometimes commiserating about our work load or our work. Now, we have three boys in total, all of them as familiar with one another as young boys can be when they are five, four, and three years of age. It is quite wondrous to see our boys getting along so well, even if they only see one another once a year.

This yearly ritual of coming to Martha's Vineyard feels like the perfect transition for our family since we are now truly East Coast people, again. Our son, who was quite despondent about saying good-bye to his Tia, said as we drove through this one section where the road seems to slice two bodies of water, "This is great!" He had been coming here since he was in utero, so this island is as much home as anywhere else. He went to camp and fell right in with his buddy, Huck. He is now at the Ink Well with his babysitter, Amy. It is as it has been for so many summers.

This island had served as such a refuge for me when the idea of living on the East Coast was the mirage that seemed to taunt me. There was so much about it that was achingly familiar, so much so that at times I felt as if I were reliving my own childhood summers at Cape May. Although I lived in LA for over ten years, I've never been impressed with the beaches there. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that there were so few beaches that were clean and accessible for those that hadn't built McMansions on those public beaches. There was also a difference in beach culture from what I remembered from my childhood. And then there was the driving to the beach that could become an obstacle in it of itself. Whatever the reasons, I could probably count on both hands the times I felt the compulsion to head to the beach while living in LA.

Martha's Vineyard, for our family, has become this yearly ritual of summer. We frequent the same restaurants that serve the most delicious fried clam strips. We trek to the fish store where we order our lobster dinner, which we eat sitting on Lobster cages as the sun sets over a scenery out of one of those insipid paintings you find in hotel rooms. We sit at the same beach that faces the Nantucket Sound where kids rule the sand and parents sit in chairs with a book in their hand. Kids ride their bikes and play outdoors in the games that are synonymous with those long summer days. There is no fast food chain to be found, each store owned by a person not attached to a large corporation. It is like stepping back in time when the highlight of a kids' day is licking a large ice cream cone outside a shop where they make their own ice cream. It is the childhood that I remember.

There are so few places that have resonated with me the way this island has. It's funny since I never get island fever like I do when I'm in Hawaii. Yes, we can get off via Ferry since we're not so far from the Cape, so perhaps that explains my lack of claustrophobia. Whatever it is, I drive along familiar roads, some of them congested during the mid day hour, sanguine about the fact that we are driving 5 miles an hour. Hard to imagine, right? There you have it. It is hard to be irate and angry when you look to your right and you see an expanse of aqua colored water, sail boats rocking up and down. How can you be angry about a place that has not one stop light, even if you wonder why that crazy five way intersection doesn't have a light?

This place is quirky in the ways of any small New England towns. Yet, there is a humility and earthiness that I find so refreshing. It is as if, despite all the wealth of the summer residents, this island has never forgotten it is is just a whaling town.

I am finally getting ready to sit down for a long haul with my newest novel, which will be set in LA. The prospect of this project has me excited, my mind gestating during the day as I engage in the things I am supposed to be doing. The first line, which I had thought of recently, pulls at me very strongly. I am much relieved to be feeling this way, and also daunted by the process of writing another book.

The backwards pull of my memories and life in LA is fading, the tug not so insistent. My email box is emptier, people putting me on the list of those they had known. My gaze is cast ahead, to what is ahead.