To the New Owners: A Martha's Vineyard Memoir - Hardcover

Blais, Madeleine

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 080212657X ISBN 13: 9780802126573

Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2017

Synopsis

In the 1970s, Madeleine Blais’s in-laws purchased a vacation house on Martha’s Vineyard for the exorbitant sum of $80,000. A little more than two miles down a poorly marked one-lane dirt road, the house was better termed a shack―it had no electricity or modern plumbing, the roof leaked, and mice had invaded the walls. It was perfect.
Sitting on Tisbury Great Pond―well-stocked with oysters and crab for foraged dinners―the house faced the ocean and the sky, and though it was eventually replaced by a sturdier structure, the ethos remained the same: no heat, no TV, and no telephone. Instead, there were countless hours at the beach, meals cooked and savored with friends, nights talking under the stars, until in 2014, the house was sold.
To the New Owners is Madeleine Blais’s charming, evocative memoir of this house, and of the Vineyard itself―from the history of the island and its famous visitors to the ferry, the pie shops, the quirky charms and customs, and the abundant natural beauty. But more than that, this is an elegy for a special place. Many of us have one place that anchors our most powerful memories. For Blais, it was the Vineyard house―a retreat and a dependable pleasure that also measured changes in her family. As children were born and grew up, as loved ones aged and passed away, the house was a constant. And now, the house lives on in the hearts of those who cherished it.

About this title

About the Author

Madeleine Blais was a reporter for the Miami Herald for years before joining the faculty of the School of Journalism at the University of Massachusetts. She is the author of In These Girls, Hope is a Muscle, Uphill Walkers, and The Heart Is an Instrument, a collection of her journalism.

Madeleine Blais lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

What was most vexing to me about selling the house was that the new owners had no idea what they were getting. They saw 5.5 acres, with only a small portion a buildable footprint. They saw the lot and the subdivision numbers by which we were known by the town of West Tisbury, important if it ever had to send a fire engine our way. They saw a roof that needed replacing and the chance to burden us with half the cost ($17,000). They saw a house they might upgrade, a house they might tear down.

What the new owners could not see, and therefore could not appreciate, was the human history, all the lives that grazed ours and the ones that truly intersected, the noisy arrivals and departures, the arguments and the recipes, the ghosts and the guests, crabs caught and birthdays celebrated, clams shucked, towels shaken, lures assembled, bonfires lit, the dogs we indulged, the ticks we cursed, the pies we consumed, and, through it all, both close by and in the distance, the moving waters (as a poet put it) at their priest-like task. They could not see the depth of the life lived here during the summer for all those years.

About this edition

• Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 080212657X
• ISBN 13: 9780802126573
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272