Notes from an island in the Puget Sound.

If you had asked me this time two years ago where Vashon Island is located, I would not have been able to tell you. I could not have given you so much as an educated guess, I’m afraid to say.

But then, in November of 2012, my good friend Erin came to visit me in India. I was renting a room in Delhi at the time, and so that became our base for the week. One day – a Tuesday, if I recall correctly – we ventured to a neighborhood called Hauz Khas Village. We found a table at a funky place called TLR Café and began to work. Erin and I met at a travel blogging conference (in Copenhagen, of all places), and so oddly enough, our favorite thing to do as friends is just sit, write, and talk shop together. I don’t remember what was keeping me occupied at the time (clearly it was my life’s work), but I can tell you that Erin was working on a story about a place called Vashon Island.

Over the course of that afternoon, I learned legendary things about Vashon. I learned that you can get there only by ferry or boat, and that although it’s just a 20-minute journey from Seattle, it feels another world away. I learned about its vineyards and farms, about a coffee roasterie that was originally part of a chain that preceded Starbucks, and about how Erin grew up picking blackberries and digging for clams on the beach right below her grandma’s house. It sounded nothing short of magical.

I got to experience the magic for myself exactly eight months later, and it only seemed right to do so with Erin. She was waiting for me at the ferry terminal when I arrived from Seattle, and we spent the next three days picking those fabled blackberries, sipping lattes at the roasterie, and hanging out with her 94-year-old grandma Vera – when we weren’t plotting our book projects, of course.

As you might remember reading, I returned to Vashon again in February – this time to stay with Vera. It was a beautiful two weeks – getting to know the island in another season, for a longer period of time, and getting to know Vera and some of her family more in-depth as well.

I couldn’t have imagined then that the next time I’d be back on the island was for her memorial celebration. Because Vera did indeed pass away, just ten days after I said goodbye to her to this winter, and when I returned to Vashon two weekends ago for the third time, it was not without a bittersweet sense of remembrance.

The sun was warm again, the blackberry bushes not yet ripe but full of promise, and her waterfront house was bursting at the seams with family. Vera’s six children were all there, as were her dozens of grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and it felt like something of a full-circle moment to finally meet everyone in person, after hearing so much about them all in February. I marveled at how one friendship had beget another friendship which had suddenly beget forty more.

This past Friday was the Fourth of July, and as we gathered again at Vera’s house to watch the annual fireworks (another Vashon legend I’d heard much about), I kept thinking about how fortunate I am to have stumbled across this magical little island – and into the lives of such a warm, generous, and open-hearted family. And I’ve continued to think about the mysterious ways in which life often works – planting seeds when we least expect it (a friendship born in Copenhagen, a Tuesday afternoon in Delhi), and then giving us equally unexpected opportunities to bring those seeds to fruition.

Sunday night, one of Vera’s sons, Richard, helped me move into her house, where I’ll be staying for the month of July. And it was as we were standing on the front driveway that he said, “I bet you didn’t think this time last year you’d be living on an island in the middle of the Puget Sound, did you?”

He echoed so perfectly what I’d already started writing for this post that it gave me chills, and I felt compelled to tell him so – about how life leads us to learn about and fall in love with certain places.

“Even more it’s the people you meet along the way,” Richard said, and to illustrate this, he told me about visiting the Isle of Man for a motorcycle race this spring, where he sat in a pub watching the bikes ride by and met a pair of travelers from the Netherlands.

“We became part of each other’s worlds, for 45 minutes or so.”

And for the next month, I get to be a part of their Vashon world.

I couldn’t feel more blessed to be here.