Salt water and Rainbows

An island is a good place to grow up.

My island was in Nova Scotia and it was always more home than anyplace I've ever been. Every Memorial Day, we would pack up my grandmother's Lincoln Contintental - kids, dogs, American cigarettes and the like - and drive off. Every Labor Day, we would pack it up again to come home. In between were some of the happiest times of my life.

It was a small island. A church, a bank, a closet sized post office, a picture show and dance hall, a barber shop that was only open on Saturday nights, a one room schoolhouse, and two small general stores that doubled as social clubs. You could buy canned goods, milk in bottles, notions, penny candy, flour, but no meat and no liquor. Meat came from the truck that made it's rounds once a week from the mainland and you had to go to the mainland for liquor or you had to know how to locate the nearest still. My grandmother stoked a cast iron wood stove every morning for cooking and heating, water was drawn from a well, and every Monday was wash day, rain or shine. You could earn a quarter for filling the wood box. When the boats came in late in the afternoon, you could take another quarter and bring home supper right off the boats. Bedtime was eight o'clock every night, precisley when the red light in the lighthouse came on.

Our house sat right on the ocean, only the front yard which led all the way to the road and the road itself were between us and the water. Across the channel, you could see the next island unless of course we were fogged in and then you couldn't see
your outstretched hand. The foghorn sometimes sounded all day and all night for a week or two at a time and then the sun would suddenly be there one morning and everything would look new and clean and so beautiful that it took your breath away. You could taste salt water in the air and see rainbows.

We played everywhere - on the rocks and around the fishing shacks, in the fields where the dried fish was laid out, on the breakwaters, in the hidden coves that were "up island". The dogs would curl up outside the back door and sleep all day in the sunshine and we'd pick wild strawberries from the field beside the driveway or blackberries from the patch around the flagpole.
We climbed the mountains of wood in the woodshed or listened to old 45's on the sunporch while we played cards or read or wrote letters home. There were Sunday School picnics and softball games after church and the house was always full of people. My great grandmother's wake was held in the living room.

Later on, I smoked my first cigarette there. Had my first drink. Played my first game of Spin the Bottle on the steps in the town square, had my first date, first kiss, first proposal and first broken heart. We would sit on the steps and sing while the heat lightning cracked over the water and then all pile into an old pick up truck and drive up to a pasture to neck and watch the stars and listen to the ocean. It was all magical and in memory becomes even more so.

Everybody should have a magic place to remember and dream about.