October 2019

By Joan Connor

That year we stayed late on the island, on into dwindling October, because I wanted to see, I needed to see, another New England fall. We heated the summer cottage with the small Franklin stove. The fire was optimistic; it provided heat enough.

The days shortened, still sunny, still buzzy with bees, and ripe with late raspberries, and blackberries warming above tall asters. The nights lengthened. The nights cooled. I read while you slept. Who knows what book? Maybe Moby Dick again? A stormy resident of our bookcase to ride out Nor’easters. How we bide our time when we think our time is bountiful. Late raspberries.

You were three. One evening we decided to walk the golf course by moonlight, all the madras pants and golf bags, and whale belts, and hail-fellow-well-meeters packed off to wherever vacationers come from—Boston, perhaps, or Florida. We were rusticators too, from D.C., but not that year and never by choice.

The sky was the reason people lingered into fall—supernal stars glittery like paillettes. And the air—salty and rolling with surf. Streetlamps highlighting the quilted patchwork of leaves. And you, you also were a reason to linger into fall, your excited hand in mine.

The golf course was a world contained, scaled to your size, contained just for you. I released your hand and you scurried between the juniper-bordered pathways. You scrambled up the stairs to the porch of the clapboarded clubhouse, a Wendy house to you. You twirled on the putting greens. You scrabbled over the footbridges, which harbored no trolls. Blackberry brambles arched over the paths. Shadows shifted with moonlit clouds.

Once, you hid behind the rugosa roses, tangled in giggles. Above us on the hill the inn windows blinked darkly, the summercaters ferried back to the land where blinds were no longer drawn, where life rattled along like a laugh track. To you, the course was a quiet amusement park, a playground, the only sound a distant clanging bell buoy. You found an inscrutable golf ball. Dare I say, magical to you, a talisman? We were both too young for skepticism, cynicism, susceptible to the magic of metaphor, forever transformed and transforming. We defined our own meanings.

That was thirty years ago.

The Great Chebeague Island Golf Course is nearly a century old. It has nine holes. At low tide, golf balls abound on the mud flats, and teenage entrepreneurs gather them for resale.

I do not play golf, and I wonder what happens on a nine-hole golf course. Do you reverse direction? Do you play through twice? What is a course, a life with no back nine? I wonder. But not that deeply.

My preference would be that the player reverses direction, that the player might walk again with you, with my son, across a deserted magical golf course. I have not returned to the island for decades now; nonetheless I think I hear you giggle among the sea-grown roses.

Time, unlike a boat, is not taut and yare except in the harbor of memory, of imagination. You and I forever transformed and transforming.

Harbor no trolls.