On Swan, the houses get closer to each other the further inland you get, and soon it starts to look almost like a normal town. A small town, obnoxious in that cute New England way. Some of the houses are original from the time the island was first settled. The Wrinklies love to tell me stories about the island’s history, only it’s hard to follow because nothing really happened. It has something to do with the slave trade, and something to do with pirates, and after that it was a popular summer resort with vacation homes and a hotel, You know, like the Hamptons (right . . . ), until it fell out of fashion in the twenties.

Swan is one of ten islands in a little archipelago called the Shoals, ten miles off the coast of New Hampshire. There’s a marine research center on Duck; people have retreats and conferences in the summer on Star. There was a poet who lived on Appledore, the island just south of Swan, in the 1800s. Celia Thaxter. I’d never heard of her but it seems like she’s famous enough. Tourist boats make trips through the Shoals most days in the summer and they always get off on Appledore (I didn’t mean that to be a pun or a double entendre or whatever, but they do, I guess) and check out Celia Thaxter’s garden.

I went over there once with Lolly. It was one of those days when March pretends it’s summer, only to kick your ass with freezing rain two days later. She was worried that I was getting depressed and said that I needed to get some air and exercise, so we got a lift in Ted’s boat—he rows people over when they need to smuggle stuff or themselves back to the mainland—and walked around Celia Thaxter’s garden. Lolly asked what I thought about it. I said it was nice. She was clearly disappointed that I didn’t start skipping through the crocuses and humming a little tune and chasing little Disney chipmunks and blue birds and bunnies. Maybe it wouldn’t have killed me to put on more of a show. Celia Thaxter’s garden looked exactly like a picture of Celia Thaxter’s garden, so it really wasn’t necessary to force me into a boat and drag me over a body of water to check out something that was obviously just going to disappoint us both in the end.