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were two daughters, Christina and Eliza, who was her great-grandmother, and both married Blakes, also Irish. She said most of them had farms, and the men worked at sea as Grand Bank fishermen and at other odd jobs. The children harvested blueberries and sold them door-to-door in Castine. There were no cars, and horses were too expensive to keep, so they often went around by boat. “Some walked all the way to Bangor for work,” she remarked. Most of the Blakes were buried in the graveyard by the blueberry field, but she also said a Colson child was buried next to another headstone in a little graveyard on our property. She took Papa out to show him the spot near the road and just down from our driveway, overgrown, but still an opening in the forest around two small stones sinking into the earth.

“It was a hard life then,” Lucy said, nodding over the stones.

In the quiet of winter, when I’d asked Mama about the people who came before us, she got books from the library about the Indians who first inhabited the land, the warrior Micmacs and peaceful agrarian Wabanakis. The Wabanaki creation myth told of a god named Koluskap who came down from the sky and turned stones into the Mihkomuwehsisok, little elves who dwelled among the rocks and made music with flutes. I was sure I’d seen them myself. Koluskap then shot arrows from his bow into the trunks of ash trees, and men and women stepped out, strong and graceful with light brown skin and shining black hair. Koluskap named them Wabanaki, People of the Dawn.

Another book told of Leif Ericson and a crew of Viking sailors who explored the Maine coast in their Viking ship with its dragon head and many oars, and of John Cabot, an Italian sailor employed by King Henry VII of England, who sailed to North America and explored the Maine coast six years after Columbus. Our cape was named for James Rosier, an explorer hired by Captain George Weymouth to write an account of his 1605 voyage. According to the report, they found a land of dense forests with pine trees two hundred feet tall and ten feet in diameter, “birch, ash, maple, spruce, cherry tree, yew, oak very great and good.” The natives, he said, referred to the land as “Mawooshen.”

In the mid-1700s, we learned, Massachusetts offered hundred-acre lots free to anyone who would move to the northern province. It was during this time that Cape Rosier and surrounding towns were settled by our predecessors, but the land was later abandoned after the Civil War, when many pioneers headed west to find new fortunes. Papa said the oldest tree he’d cut down on our property had eighty-three growth rings, indicating that at the turn of the century the area was fielded land created by the original settlers, but as people moved away, trees reclaimed the land once again. My favorite tales of this time were, of course, the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, especially Little House in the Big Woods, as I often felt I had more in common with Laura than with my contemporaries.

By the 1900s, Henry Ford’s success at mass-producing the automobile brought a new type of settler, summer folk and out-of-staters, like us, who would become Maine’s grudging bread and butter. With them came Robert McCloskey, who wrote and illustrated some of my favorite stories, Blueberries for Sal, One Morning in Maine, and Time of Wonder, at his summer home on Scott Island, just off the coast of Cape Rosier. These books, and others by E. B. White, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Elizabeth Coatsworth, captured Maine’s remote beauty and brought more visitors, including Helen and Scott in the 1950s, who found that the rugged nature of the landscape and the long winters afforded the privacy they sought and provided the ideal setting in which to re-create the lifestyle of the original settlers.

But as much as we had in common with our earlier predecessors, the difference was that even in our remote corner of Maine, the modern world, in my parents’ opinion, was still too close.

The sound of a plane tore the quiet blue of morning sky. Customers were chatting on the green swath of grass in front