Orcas Island Part 1

I've written and shared a lot about Orcas over the years. There's a good reason for it, too. It's not just the place we go up to every summer, a tradition longstanding, although that is part of it, and how it grew into what it is now. There is more to the story, of course. There always is.

I can count at least nine different places that my grandmother lived in the past two decades, and that's not counting the globe-trotting she did before. My grandfather moved around a little less than she did, but except for when I was very little, there was never a place that I felt was his. I've never had a house that I could point to and say, "This is my grandma's home," without hesitation or "This is where my roots are." Never been a place like that, except for Alderbrook.

When you're given a farmhouse, one hundred and twenty-six years old--a dinosaur on the west coast--that your family has loved and lived in since before it was built, you take it and love it with all your soul. Going to Orcas is going home for us, and it is only more so now that my grandmother cannot come with us anymore.

So on memorial day weekend, we took the ferry out, got a little high on salt air, and let our worries fly to the wind.