“My troubles are all over,
And I am at home.”
- Anna Sewell
It all began over Bahama Buck’s Italian ice. I was seven months pregnant with Elissa, and Nathan had taken me out to celebrate our fourth anniversary. His eyes danced and he was so excited he was practically bouncing in the booth as he slipped a card across the table.
“Happy anniversary!” he crowed as I opened the card and unfolded…a map of the trip I’d dreamed of taking for a lifetime. “An Adventure for Kindred Spirits” was spelled across the top. We’d land in Boston, bop around Harvard, Bar Harbor, and Bay of Fundy, and then – wonder of wonders – end up in Prince Edward Island, the land of my dreams.
A month earlier, Nate had asked me: “Where would you go if you could go anywhere in the world?”
“Prince Edward Island!” I responded without missing a beat. I had devoured the Anne of Green Gables movies and books countless times since I was five years old, and the landscapes studded with unbelievable color and utter serenity had made up my dreams ever since. Nate had already taken one unforgettable trip to PEI with his family. He planned this trip as a total surprise, our last hurrah before becoming a family of three. We left the next day.
The whole vacation was magical, but PEI felt like coming home. I spent that weekend in a state of perpetual ecstasy, feeling simultaneously that this couldn’t possibly be real life, and that my dreams had come true. All too soon, it was time to leave, but I carried a piece of the Island – L.M. Montgomery’s “land of ruby, emerald, and sapphire” – irrevocably in my heart forever afterwards.
Fast forward to 2016. Nate had been gone a year and a half, and I was suffocating. An abundance of family and friends had housed me and Elissa, supporting us every moment of every day while I struggled to make sense of this new reality, the nightmare that never ended. My period of numbness was finally over, and I was desperate to be alone with my grief, surrounded by the salt water that Isak Dinesen calls “the cure for anything: sweat, tears or the sea.”
I needed it all, needed it now. So I put 18-month-old Elissa and our clothes in my car, and drove 16 hours north. Physically crossing the Confederation Bridge to my beloved PEI unlocked something in me. I cried for weeks: washing dishes, walking by the sea, biking through meadows studded with wild lupins, every naptime and bedtime. I feverishly re-read our love story, recorded so meticulously in dozens of journals kept over our eight years together, with all the fervor of a new romance impossible to put down. Then I would come up for air, gasping with the gut punch of how it all ended, in disbelief over what had happened to us when we were so happy. And I wrote. Feverishly, in ever spare moment, pages and pages of my devastation, disappointment, distrust.
The end of that summer brought no magic healing or resolution, but for the first time there was peace. I readied myself to reengage with society, already dreaming of my next trip north. We repeated the drill in 2017, ’18, and ’19, each summer returning to familiar places and growing friendships with a deepening sense of home. And I began to look at properties.
All the major life decisions I was considering felt incomplete without a permanent haven in PEI. So when I stumbled across the yellow-doored white house in New London while perusing my friend Heidi’s Instagram during the early days of Covid, I knew. Close to the water. Check. Nestled in the heart of a small town, minutes from our favorite people and attractions. Check. Fully furnished, with a guest cottage. Check, check. This was It – the home I’d so long imagined; the “two-story house with a yard” of Elissa’s dreams. Hands shaking and heart pounding, I texted Heidi. The house was still for sale, and she walked me through on Skype. The whole world was at a standstill, we were locked down in France, and I bought a house in Canada – never imagining it would be two years before we could get there.
Elissa didn’t know about the house. Even last month when I packed a U-haul trailer full of furniture and pictures and books, she didn’t suspect a thing. Sweet, trusting girl that she is, she accepted my explanations: “We’ll be in PEI all summer, so we’ll need a lot of stuff.”
We spent a week at Kindred Spirits, the inn Nathan took me to eight years ago, reuniting with our favorite places and people for the first time in three years. Then, on the first Saturday in June, we drove to The House, allegedly to meet the exquisite Island photographer, Simon, for our annual photo shoot. Simon snapped away as Elissa, blissfully unaware, picked dandelions and explored the yard of her new home. Then, while his tripod covertly filmed away in the background, I asked her a question:
“Elissa, do you believe that God loves you, and knows the desires of your heart before you even ask Him?”
A curious, tentative “yess…”
“Do you believe that He LOVES to give you good gifts?”
“Yes?!”
“What if I told you that He had a two-story house, with a yard, on PEI? For you!”
She gasped and stared with disbelief. I produced the keys and gestured grandly.
“THIS is your house! Welcome home!!”
I will never forget the next few moments. Elissa flew into my arms and stayed there, motionless, tears of joy and disbelief glistening on her lashes. “Thank you,” she finally whispered, and we set off to explore our house – the Island summer home of our dreams, where we will rest and discover and create and continue to build a beautiful life together. This house is a gift from our Father. It is a gift from Nate, who first brought our little family here eight years ago. One day, I dream of sharing this gift with others in need of the same peace and respite that I’ve found here.
As I type this, we’ve been in our summer home for one month. Rain is pattering on the windows; a cool breeze stirs the maple trees and whips the waves of the ocean on the horizon. I am overwhelmed by God’s faithfulness. “Weeping may remain for a night, but joy comes in the morning.” Here, on Prince Edward Island, is peace…is home.
