Caesura

And, breathe.

A week ago was the bridal shower. A week from now we will have rehearsed, and will be just starting the rehearsal dinner, currently the part of the wedding I am most able to look forward to.

This wedding thing? I guess it is just a crucible.

And I can make my peace with that. A week ago I couldn't. In a little over a week it will be a story- memories, with the mementoes and photos to back them up. But tonight, all is quiet. Dark, cozy, and quiet. Dave is off to attend Abigail's sports award banquet and to pick her up for Thanksgiving break. They'll be home tomorrow on the late boat. The house (at least the first floor) is in still in some semblance of order from when I cleaned last weekend for company. There is still a certain amount of wedding cultch: the boxes from the shower I haven't brought to the burn barrel; the very heavy box of tablecloths and runners that just came in today; the dress in its bag lounging on the love seat whispering "attend to me..."

The place is slowly taking shape, actually, in the way that houses do. It's now about 338 days since we moved in here. And the place was pretty spartan. Today I came home and realized that it now officially looks like I live here. Those of you who were around for the Spinster Pad probably know what I mean. Variations on the theme of tea. The major differences being the gun cabinet, a TV, and the impressive assortment of commercial fishing outerwear about the place. Eventually in some other house I will probably find a way for Dave's three stuffed and mounted bears to look genteel.

At any rate, it was nice to come home and feel a bit more at home- and we do now have the amenities of a washing machine and dryer- and, thanks the the generosity of island women, matching towel sets. Don't even get me started on the matching glasses. It's funny, as slightly weirded out as I was by having a bridal shower- attention and gifts on any kind of large scale discomfit me- I think the shower was a turning point in how I felt about this whole awful process of having a wedding. Yep. People will gather around to and look at you. And give you presents.

And it will be okay.

I was raised with the "it is better to give than to receive" ethos, and have more than a passing affection for the prayer of St. Francis. So this recipient stuff freaks me out. That's part of why the wedding planning bothered me. If it is for my benefit, I don't like to ask much of anyone who is not blood family or friend family.

So asking for help, and asking people to abruptly make plans, and then to create a registry of stuff for people to buy for me? The people close to me saw my beastly bits- not only do I not like to ask people for things, but I am also pretty introverted, so don't have much of an internal drive to have people bear witness to anything. Plop that combo into the position of bride and there will be crankiness.

But then Heather fed me wine and showed me on graph paper that things could indeed work out. And the best possible housing opened up, despite a very strained friendship. And people I love reminded me that the people I love are really, really good people.

Tonight finds me home, in peace. Dave and Abigail will be home from New Hampshire tomorrow, and my adopted Abbigail (teach and you are bound to accrue children from time to time) is due home at eleven, or there will be hell to pay! Over the course of the week I was elected Executive Director of the affordable housing/economic non-profit for the island, and accepted a position on the board of the mailboat company. The big reason I moved the wedding was to better be able to focus on this kind of community work- happily settled, on the other side of this rite of passage.

Islander?

This weekend we took what was, to my mind, our honeymoon. Dave wasn't sold on the concept, but it was retreat enough for me. We registered for the Sustainable Island Living Conference that the Island Institute was holding in Rockland. Splurging (only a very little) we got two nights in a bed and breakfast rather than in the cheap rooms.

Checking in the first night, we came to the surprising realization that we were assigned to separate restaurants for lunch the following day, which put a crimp in the togetherness, but all in all, it was nice to be off island.

I like ideas, I like listening to people, new knowledge. I am also very fond of the staff of the Institute. The first night, we listened to Woody Taasch give a presentation on the concept of slow money- and it was pretty much the first entirely free-associative power point presentation I have ever seen. The man was clearly a Very Intelligent man, which meant you needed to make the connections on your own because he wasn't going to spoon feed them to you. Peace be upon the wiry-haired geniuses of the world. And upon the concept of investing in people and meaningful products of use and value... harkened me back to one of my favorite Puritan ideas- competency, which is to say earning "enough." Not a killing, but a living.

The next day there was another speaker, a wonderful reconteur from Ocracoke, NC. Then break-out sessions broken up by a really good lunch. The theme this year was island-to-island connections and conversations, so there were islanders from Oregon, North Carolina, Block Island, and Prince Edward Island. Whenever we talk about the islands in Maine, there's always a strong sense of solidarity, but equally strong understanding that each island has a lot of very unique circumstances and challenges. The solidarity, I believe, comes from knowing that there are very definite limits to what can be sustained, and a feeling that stewardship and restraint is always paramount. You have to think, you have to care, you have to plan, and collaborate. And the stakes always seem so high, the place so dear.

And oh, how seriously we take it all; how continuously we can talk. Get islanders talking, and they can continue on into perpetuity. I suppose that is the one infinite resource we can claim.

So we chatted away the time, over good food, and with the easy connection that comes from the shared identity of "islander."

And how did I become one of these hard-headed folk? Why did I pick up on that as an identity? My friends went on to other places, my family moved back to their home town on the mainland, and I bounced my way back to the the same bay. Wrapped myself back in the mantle of a way of life that is just plain difficult.

Because the only guarantee is that there will be a lot of work. Which may be futile, and will likely be thankless. And the reward, it seems is the identity. Hey, look at us, tough enough to survive on the edges. It is not romantic, or noble. It is a collective of people who are addicted to uneasy, who get accustomed to the idea of nowhere as the only where.

That said, I very much enjoyed the intimacy of the weekend, the ideas, the comradery. The conversations, the passion for place. I don't know why I ended up an islander, I don't know that it is a choice, or that at this point I could change.

And still I wonder, which island will win out.

And on especially long days, I think the mainland seems like heaven. Surely I could find a nice piece of nowhere there.