Little Compton

This is where my heart lives, I’ve always said, though the logical part of me knows it’s not a sensical thing to believe. My heart is just an organ; just a mass of flesh inside my rib cage. Yet whatever it is that we refer to as the heart – the spirit, the essence of my being, the part of the sentient me that throbs with life – that part was born right here, in this place, I tend to think, and not too long after my physical birth took place.

When I first came here I was just a few months old. My mother had swum in this ocean for 30 years at that point, and she took me right in, introducing me immediately to the feel of the salt water, the buoyancy of my body amidst the waves. A year or two later, she taught me how to submerge myself below a crashing wave—how to protect myself from its strength by sitting fully under it, to overcome it from below. I must’ve been very small then, because the waves here are not too tall but in my memory, as I watch my crouching-down self, my eyes-squeezing-shut self, the wave towers above me, as though it were solitary and 15 feet tall. I have never forgotten the first time I did that; my mother must’ve been nearby, perhaps beside me, but in my memory of it, I am alone; I am seated serenely on the sea floor as the water barrels over top of me.

In my first many summers here, she always referred to me as her water baby, her little fish who would not come out of the ocean for much of anything before dinnertime. When I did retreat from the waves, it was usually at full sprint, aiming toward one thing and one thing only—the towel she had waiting for me, spread wide along her arm span, shaken free of sand, dry, warm, and engrossing. As soon as I bolted into it she had it around me, she was rubbing my arms through it to warm them up, kissing my wet forehead, rocking my drying body in her lap, enveloping me in a snuggle. For this I was delighted to leave the ocean; for only this.

Evenings here were always simple. Before dinner, there might be a walk down to the cove, some prowling for mussels or blue crabs, a game of croquet. At 7 p.m., the opening jingle of NBC Nightly News would lure us into the house, which we’d shunned since morning, which we aimed not to enter as long as the sun still shone. Grandma and Grandpa would already be seated, bourbon and gin glasses in their respective hands. They tuned out the shuffling of cards as we slid our tan bodies onto the soft carpet, belly-down, and began to play. They listened to the news, often interrupting it to state their commentary; I listened mostly to the pleasing garble of Tom Brokaw’s speech, the gentle timbre of his voice. I loved him; I loved these summer evenings with the whole family; I loved their reliability—recurring identically day after day and year after year so that I sometimes forgot which visit I was enjoying, which age I had become in the intervening year, which life story had unfolded in between my timeless summer vacations.

I’ve come to Little Compton all 32 summers of my life. In the ten years I lived in Boston, I also came here weekly in good weather and monthly, often, in the off-season. The landscape, over time, has changed a little—the cliff I like to stand on at the end of the lane is slowly crumbling, sitting further back from the sea; the cabanas that once stood just behind the beach have been swept away by storms, the paths around them grown to mere hints of walkways under the dominating sprawl of rose hips and poison ivy; the gardens I like to wander in have expanded throughout our yard, no longer limited to the areas just around the house. Some years we have berries growing; some years Grandpa has killed them off. Some years trees lose branches, hurricanes and snowstorms ripping all but their boughs away, leaving bare spots and scraggly tops. Soon, I know, a more important feature of this place’s geography will change on me, and it will be the only one with which I cannot cope—soon, I know, my grandparents will no longer live here. In the meantime, as I return to this place that they’ve welcomed us into since I was born—since my mother was born too—I think of it only as I have always known it: as my place of freedom, my place to live without purpose other than to enjoy myself, my place to sit and think.

There is a spot on the cliff at the end of the lane where a meadow gives itself over to the sea. There the earth simply crumbles, the rocks below catching it, the sea beyond slowly moving farther from the land. (When my mother was young, the cliff ended in a dirt road; it wound along the precipice, letting cars pass along the wide point of land. As a child, I remember seeing the remnants of that car path—just a few inches you could walk on, dead-ending into shrubbery before you could reach the very tip of the point.)

On that cliff, in that place where earth gives way to rock and sea, there is a spot I have returned to yearly, often monthly, and there I have returned to my self. It is an opening in the honey suckle; a tufty patch of grass amidst low bushes; and though it has shrunk with time it has remained there, still easy to find. I have sat there and stood there, sometimes lightly clad, sometimes decked out in full fleece or wool. I have sat there and stood there, sometimes for just a moment, sometimes for hours on end. I have sat there and stood there, each time saying a silent hello to my ocean, each time saying a silent hello to all the past selves that surround me there. I sit there or stand there and time is both forgotten and accentuated—when I am there, I have never left that spot; when I am there, I am the new sum total of everywhere I’ve ever been.

That spot, this place, they are my signpost in life. Here I sit quietly and reinvigorate myself; I revisit all the past me’s who have been here and, when I depart, I take them with me; I take the lessons they’ve learned and the experiences they’ve had, the heartache and the bliss they have felt; I take all of this quietly away inside me.

To go to a place each year, to measure yourself and your life against its longevity, to take strength and pleasure from that—something in all that gives birth to my joy. This is where my heart lives, you can tell—where I come to reflect on my contentment; where I come to acknowledge just how much I have lived and to look forward to all that lies ahead.