THE PLACES THAT REARRANGE US
Yesterday, my daughter officially learned to ride a bike.
One second she's wobbling, yelling "don't let go" over her shoulder, the next she's twenty feet ahead of us, laughing, flying on her own.
It happened on Martha's Vineyard, which feels like a Spielbergian dream location to reach a childhood milestone.
I think everyone has a place that rearranges them a little. For my husband, it's here. He's spent enough summers on this island that every other street corner unlocks a memory. Favorite ice cream shops still here from forty years ago. Bike rides with cousins. Beaches that feel exactly the same and completely different at once. It's been lovely watching him hand our girls a place that already lived so vividly in his head, and watching it become theirs too, in real time.
People refer to City Island "the Martha's Vineyard of the Bronx," but I’ve been here three days and yet to hear anyone on the Vineyard to return the favor and call themselves the City Island of Massachusetts. I get the comparison though - boats bobbing around in the harbor. Cedar shake seafood shacks. Salt in the air thick enough to taste. Everything just a half-step slower than it needs to be.
I've always been drawn to the water. I grew up in a city on an island surrounded by ferries and wooden junk boats and humidity and overflowing fishtanks outside seafood restaurants, staring across the water and wondering what was on the other side of it. The garlic king prawns, salt and pepper squid, & clams in black bean sauce of my youth have somehow, decades later, become lobster rolls and fried clams in a different country entirely. The feeling never changed, just the menu.
There's a reason so many cultures treat water as something sacred. Put me near water and my shoulders drop about two inches. Looking out on the ocean makes it harder to keep pretending you don't need to slow down. Tides don't rush. Waves can be roaring or waves can be quiet, and there’s nothing you can do to will them otherwise. The ocean reminds us to slow down enough to hear ourselves think.
Next week I'll be standing next to a different stretch of water with an incredible group of women, heading to Greece together. We've already started getting to know each other over texts and Zooms and a couple of pre-trip gatherings, and I have a feeling this will become one of those weeks we'll still be talking about years from now.
I keep coming back to the water. Not because it solves anything. Just because every time I leave it, I leave a little lighter. A little more myself. The way my daughter was, twenty feet ahead of us before she even realized we'd let go.
🍂 Escape to Kingston This Fall
Our Hudson Valley Retreat is getting closer, and the waitlist is officially open. A long autumn weekend with Pilates, yoga, hikes, genuinely good food, crisp October air, and company worth keeping. If a little time away sounds exactly right about now, we'd love to have you.