My Mother’s Islands

In my mother’s life there were many islands. She knew them long before she spent a few quiet weeks on the Florida gem of Captiva, writing her best-loved book, Gift from the Sea. She knew islands after that time, too. Each one left its mark upon her life and upon other lives as well.

The first was in Maine’s Penobscot Bay, where her father, Dwight Morrow, built a summer home on North Haven in 1928, on a piece of land known as Deacon Brown’s Point. There were pine and spruce trees, rocky beaches, and views across the water toward the sloping blue shapes of other islands in the middle distance, and beyond those to the hills of Camden on the mainland.

My mother and her family walked the coastline