Located off the southwest coast of Mount Desert Island in Maine,
Gotts Island, a mile across and three miles round, is ringed with
bright granite--a "rock bound belt" that suggests concreteness,
independence, and separation from the sea around it. But no island,
no place, ever stands alone and unchanging. The small, close-knit
community established on Gotts Island in the late eighteenth
century disappeared in the twentieth, leaving behind mere traces,
names on the cemetery stones. In its wake came the summer people,
returning year after year, with "bags, bundles, and memory."
Having purchased the house of poet and writer Ruth Moore in 1965,
Christina Gillis has been a summer resident of Gotts Island for
more than forty years. Each summer she and her husband, John,
arrive with their books, projects, and lives. On the island they
watched their young sons, Chris and Ben, turn from "two small blond
boys in high-top overalls" to "shirtless adolescents" and finally
to young men.
But the place that was a constant center in their lives, that
nourished them and their friendships with visitors and neighbors,
assumed a more profound significance for the Gillis family in 1992
when they buried the ashes of their son Ben in the island cemetery.
Ben had been killed seven months earlier while flying a small plane
in Kenya. In the cemetery overlooking the sea, once the heart of
the village and still central to the community, he joined
generations of earlier islanders to become a "name in stone."
In this elegant and gentle memoir of place and experience, the
author takes the reader on a tour of the island, making connections
between its stark physical beauty, its known and unknown places,
andthe decades of memories and myths it encompasses. Gillis
describes the social role of the dock, the portal for arrivals and
departures that are so important to island life; she traverses the
pathways that cross the Island, offering up its topographical
intricacies and secrets; and she revisits the cemetery that, though
bounded by its fence, shares a field with the annual Fourth of July
softball game. A location of loss is also a place of life.
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