Peak Summer on Prince Edward Island
Almost 20 years ago, I went to Prince Edward Island for the first time.
I was 17, done high school, and desperate for excitement. When I deferred college in favor of Canada World Youth – a yearlong volunteer program split between rural Canada and an international destination – my parents were supportive but skeptical, waving with worry-creased faces as I passed through security.
I spent the first half of my gap year in Souris, a tiny 1,000-person town on PEI’s eastern shore. My host family were the McKies – salt-of-the-earth blueberry farmers with three teenaged daughters – and I worked at a nearby primary school, painting murals and abusing my unfettered access to the laminator. Never before or since have I led such a double life. My world was babysitting, beekeeping, and painting potato-shaped pottery with Birdie, the family matriarch who lived next door. It also brimmed with every low-stakes form of adolescent rebellion – sneaking out of the house, drinking in unfinished basements, starting a not-so-secret relationship with one of my fellow participants that nearly got us both sent home. PEI is where I learned how to operate farm equipment, how to warp a loom, and how to dig myself out of waist-deep snow in October. It’s also where I learned how to get into (and talk my way out of) some serious trouble. By the time I left for the second half of the program, in Jamaica, I think I’d just about worn my host parents out.
When I returned to PEI 13 years later, in 2016, it was to spend a week at Emmett’s parents’ cottage in Keppoch, a community ten minutes outside of Charlottetown. The DeBlois family farmhouse, charmingly dubbed ‘Cherry Corner,’ was built in the late 1800s, is now welcoming its fifth generation of visitors, and literally had green gables before being re-roofed in red recently (“I was devastated,” deadpanned Emmett’s cousin Masha when recalling the color change).
In stark contrast to the ever-evolving chaos of New York City, Keppoch is a case study in idyllic consistency. Each day, low tide reveals a hundred feet of brick-red sand and high tide laps against rocky cliffs. Retirees – everyone there appears to be retired – gather for weekly luncheons and afternoon tennis games. Every resident seems to have descended from the same handful of families. In that respect, Keppoch is much like Souris, where it didn’t take long to develop a mental map of how everyone was distantly related to each other. At the end of that 2016 trip, Emmett and I borrowed his parents’ car and drove back to the site of my life’s first big adventure. I parked at the end of the McKie’s driveway – everything looked as it always had – and contemplated knocking on their door to say hi. But would they remember me fondly – as the girl who loved the town library, who dressed up as Little Red Riding Hood for Halloween, who helped lead their Girl Guides troupe? – or with disdain – as the girl who broke their rules, missed her curfew, and brought boys back to their drive shed? I didn’t get out of the car.
Now, I’m closer to becoming my parents than I am to my 17-year-old former self. And so when I went to PEI a few weeks ago, it felt different.
Back at Keppoch, Emmett, Finnegan, Kip, and I rented a beautiful cottage up the street from Cherry Corner. With knotty pine panelling, scandi-style furniture, and a view of the ocean, it was the perfect place to realize my peak summer fantasies. We draped every surface in wet beach towels. We walked around with sand-spackled feet. We opened the windows and let the salt breeze flow through the house and swell every surface with humidity.
We took day trips too. Trips to North Rustico for lobster rolls, to Victoria-by-the-Sea to gorge on chocolate, to Cardigan to visit Canada’s smallest library, and to Charlottetown to buy books, wander farmer’s markets, and watch the kids delight in the car-shaped grocery carts at Sobey’s. One night, to mark our ninth wedding anniversary, Emmett and I returned to the province’s familiar eastern edge for the Inn at Bay Fortune’s famous Fireworks Feast. The drive took us through Souris, where I once again found myself at the end of the McKie’s driveway. But though time has made me into someone I think they’d be proud of rather than repelled by, I once again lost my nerve.
So we drove back to Keppoch for a few more days of wading in cool water, flying kites, and drenching each other with Super Soakers. At night, we sat with Emmett’s family and began hatching plans for the next PEI trip. And who knows? Maybe that’ll be the visit where I’ll finally go beyond the bottom of the driveway.
[The lone surviving photo of my months in PEI, complete with the aforementioned Halloween costume]
