I'm sorry about your wallet. What are you going to do now?
Summer here stretches lazily into September, but this island shuts down next week, pretty much, because of the early starting dates for so many grade schools and colleges. Also, the blackberries are ripening, and sunsets are starting to come noticeably earlier. The goldenrod and queen anne's lace are nodding on the roadsides, instead of greeny grass and buttercups.
I'm exhausted, which is silly because my work isn't so hard. But I'm a minor public figure here, and that's the hard and strange part. Every trip out of my cottage, on this small and insular island, is a performance. An easy performance, because mostly I'm friendly and genuinely interested in the weather and that question you have about your boat or your child, but it starts to take its toll at this point in the summer. My husband and my best friends are elsewhere, and although I'm making friends here, its not quite the same. I work for the folks on this island, so we're not quite peers. I'm lonely.
But the landscape here is like home to me. There is no other place I have been that pulls at me so strongly. The combination of pine and moss and fern, rock and water and seaweed, the islands and the tide and the cormorants and the ospreys, the sounds and the smells and the green and blue and grey and brown. It feels like home, just sitting on the dock.