Maybe This Place Picked Me
...the price of a ferry ticket to find my soul
When I arrived on the Island 17 years ago, I was one year sober and still experiencing the kind of wild brain activity that happens after your dopamine receptors begin to change. Almost immediately after I stopped drinking, I began writing poetry again – something I hadn’t done much of since college and my early New York days. It was freaky, almost magical. Somehow the faucet had reopened. By the time I got to the Island, I was writing a poem a day.
If you think about it, maybe it wasn’t so strange. When you’re getting sober, you start talking to your higher power a lot, reconnecting after wandering around in the wilderness alone all those years. And a poem is like a prayer. So there’s that.
Of course, the Vineyard gave me new and endless material. Very quickly, in those early months of 2008, I had settled into a quiet routine of walking, cooking, and writing. I was working towards the deadline for my first cookbook, but I was also trying to figure out what the hell I was doing, having separated myself from my husband for this little “sabbatical.” I used the walking to air out my brain and to take pictures. At some point I decided to make bookmarks out of bits of my poems and photos I’d taken on my explorations.
