My family and I were lucky enough to get to vacation on Cape Cod a few summers ago. We immediately fell in love and are all itching to go back as soon as humanly possible! We took the ferry over to Martha's Vineyard while we were there. We only had a small span of time on the island and only spent half a day there and only walked around the part of Oak Bluffs nearest to the ferry stop, but within those few hours we knew that the island was a special place. When we think of going back to Massachusetts Martha's Vineyard is always at the top of all 5 of our lists. It's such a peaceful place. I really enjoyed reading Madeleine Blais's book about her family's little cottage there. My favorite part of the book are the logs that they kept and she shared throughout this beautiful written book. I also learned a lot more about the MV (such as people abbreviating it MV) that make me want to go back even more than I did before. I know the author's family will continue to go back to the island whether they have a house or not and that makes my heart happy. Martha's Vineyard is a place for the soul to rest and reset and I will make it a goal to spend more time there some day, hopefully soon.

For the past five years, I’ve been traveling to Martha’s Vineyard for Viable Paradise Workshop, so I’ve had the opportunity to explore a place that hitherto I’d only heard about.

My expectation as I’d first stepped off the ferry had been of a sort of island Beverly Hills. What you actually see are tiny coast-hugging towns, each with its own personality. The mansions of the super-rich do exist, but are largely hidden, a few glimpsed across wetlands as you drive or bike the island’s perimeter. Instead, what the non-billionaire visitor gets is a wonderful experience, which is richly described in this beautifully, even tenderly written memorial.

It is loosely organized around the summers the author’s extended family spent on the island. Her parents-in-law bought a summer home decades ago when their family was young, a falling-down shack on one of the many ponds. The author, brought there for the first time, was warned that it was a shack, but she (from a large family in a small town, and not raised to wealth) assumed that this was typical rich folk deprecation, and packed for upscale vacation.

She said: I had experienced student-style poverty and had recently practiced the prim economies of someone fresh to the workforce paying back student loans.

It was then that I got an inkling of how some people delight in deprivation, even court it. The idea of a certain kind of cheerful self-abnegation in gorgeous settings was new to me, the notion that patched elbows, fraying hems, and chipped dishes throw perfect vistas into relief and also the notion that the less your summer setting resembled the heavy baggage of your winter setting, the better.

In other words, the shack really was a shack. But a shack in a glorious setting.

Eventually the shack was later upgraded, but it was still very much a summer home: indoor toilets and electricity eventually added, and a deck that was never quite free of splinters. Not exactly luxury, and yet the sum of their experience was exponentially more precious than mere expensive impedimenta: waking each day to wonderful weather, with the prospect of a long day of fun stretching ahead, surrounded by those you love most.

This book includes memorials about rich and famous people as well as family, but it is not about being rich and famous. It’s about family, and togetherness, time and appreciation, eccentricity and laughter—and sometimes sudden sorrow, and how one copes.

Using the log that summer guests had to write in at the end of each summer (that included family members, even the kids), the author swoops back and forth across time, veering between describing the glorious fun her family had each summer, and taking the reader on a vividly described tour of the island over the years. Many of the idiosyncratic places she describes are still there, others are gone—as she acknowledges.

I think Jane Austen said this, but if she did not, as Miss Pith, she should have:

Everything happens at parties.

I looked around that night and realized that at certain signal moments the people you gather and the place where they assemble can be in and of itself a work of art, as real as any painting in a museum. The built-in vanishing act underscored the power of the moment.”

“The greatest heartache about getting old,” Lydia once wrote, “is wanting so much, yearning, to be around and to see and be with the next generation, with their talents and passions and possibilities and graduations and passages and achievements and joys and knowing you can’t or won’t be there.”

The book falters a bit somewhere in the middle, when a number of famous guests are described: the author doesn’t quite find that balance between not enough (quotations from the summer guest log, and a précis of who each person was) and too much (mostly a journalistic summary of notable achievements in the wider world outside the island) but that segment is brief enough. She brings the book back around to family, and the narrative settles once again into an emotionally textured, vivid testament, coming at last to the end that everyone knew had to be.

There is overall a strong sense of the passage of time: the book was written after the author lost those beloved in-laws (one of them Lydia Katzenbach, the Lydia of the magnificent parties quoted above)—wife of a man quite well known in government circles. After they passed away, and the newer generation had all grown up and moved on to adult lives, it was decided that the time had come to sell the house and property.

Inevitably the new owners were putting up a McMansion, but that happens. It was time to let go. But memory stays, especially when written up in loving detail as exampled here.

Compelling read! Well written. I would absolutely highly recommend.