Aging in place

By Margery Irvine

Brooklyn to Brooklin. I even have the t-shirt.

These words bookend many decades, with some stops along the way. But 42 years ago, when I came here for the first time, looked across Blue Hill Bay to Tinkers Island and Mount Desert, and said “I’m never leaving this place,” maybe I sensed something in my future.

At the time, my wish to stay in Brooklin seemed unlikely to be fulfilled: My first husband and I were visiting our friends Bill and Stephanie in their camp. Several years after that, however, Stephanie died, and several years after that sad event, I was divorced.

Let me describe the camp. It had been built in the 1930s by the Dodge family, on acres of land on Harriman Point owned by the Brooklin Baptist Church, a bequest for the purposes of harvesting firewood. Bill and Stephanie were able to buy the building and lease the land.

It was a typical Maine camp. The outside weathered cedar shingle, the inside bare wood walls. Small rooms, rather dark, and no more than five feet from the water’s edge. No electricity or running water, of course, and certainly no insulation.

Bill and Stephanie built an addition, put sliders in the bedroom and living room, put in electricity, and ran piping in from the dug well—but without a septic system, we embarked on the  saga called “Alternatives to an Outhouse.” Here’s the short version: chemical toilet. Destroilet (don’t ask). Biolet 1. Biolet 2. I could write a book, but who’d read it?

Everyone loved the camp. The mice loved it. The red squirrels loved it. The mosquitoes loved it. The bats loved it. Raccoons lived under the deck (another addition), deer looked in the windows. 

But also the people: family, friends—they put up with the above residents just to be mere feet from the water, to be listening to waves and gulls, to be walking on the beach and climbing rocks.

Margery Irvine describes her home—and all its guests—over the years on the edge of Blue Hill Bay. Photo courtesy of the author.

We all especially loved going out in the boat with Bill and hauling recreational lobster traps. At low tide, just before dinner, we could pick up seaweed growing on the rocks and gather bushels of mussels. We got better at digging clams after my Chinese American daughter-in-law Joanne showed us how to plunge a chopstick in the clam hole and unerringly find the clam below. 

Eventually, the church decided to sell us the land. So here we were with an old camp and, 10 miles away in Blue Hill, a 200-year-old house. It made all kinds of sense to sell the house, demolish the camp, and build a year-round house (insulation! Double-glazed windows! A flush toilet!) almost in its exact place.

And what a fortunate place to have, purely by chance.. 

Plenty has changed. The mussels are gone, and with them, some of the gulls. Few sea stars, fewer urchins and sand dollars. The clams aren’t as plentiful. The mice, bats, and squirrels are frustrated by the lack of cracks in the walls. The mosquitoes don’t like screens without handy tears. I haven’t seen a cottontail in years, although a family of hares visits us often.

Had the camp still been in its original place, well, it would be gone now, the bank below it swept away by rising tides. The stone outdoor fireplace, built long ago, is in peril of falling onto the beach, the lawn between it and the sand long gone. Again, eaten away by storms and rising tides.

Harriman Point, of course, shrugs off the changes made by wind, tide, green crabs, and rising sea temperatures. Settled in 1795, the Point still bears the signs of the original landowners: a foundation with an apple tree growing where once the house stood, crumbled stone walls, overgrown fields.

Plenty more has remained the same: the bedroom, facing east, brightens at 4:30 on summer mornings. The country music playing on the lobster boats still drowns out the sound of the boats’ engines. 

So here we sit, two old people who now pay to have the lawn mowed, the snow shoveled, the plants pruned and mulched, the trash picked up. 

Will we continue to be able to age in this place we love? Who can say—but one thing I’m sure of. No matter what place we happen to be in when the tide takes us away, our ashes will be in the water lapping the shore, our spirits hovering above the eagles’ nests and the pine trees.

—Irvine lives in Brooklin.