Jackson Mississippi is my Castle Island

Last year I read Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, on Castle Island, camping at our old spot, in view of the Fastnet rock, seals singing on East Carthy island, a couple of wagtails skimming the rocks, a young gannet under instruction. 

This year I brought Eudora Welty, The Optimist's Daughter. For a few days, her Mississippi is my Castle Island. She spent almost all her life in Jackson, Mississippi. I have spent three days maybe six times camping on the same spot on Castle Island. Nonetheless I live there and I've never left. When I can't sleep I remember the sound of waves at night on Castle Island.  

I wrote the yellow horned poppies on the beach and the sound of one church bell, the first time we came here. One year we were here in a thick August mist, bumping into things like the family in Amarcord. Once we had to haul the canoe over the island waist—Fitzcarraldo comes to Roaringwater Bay—because the wind was too strong. 

We have walked the sheep paths, reconstructed the donkey paths, picked up plastic, timed the Fastnet light, when it comes on and how frequently after that, picked mint outside one of the ruined houses, imagined the island's past and future.

Seals in the bay come to visit. On the last morning, a hare found our tent and stood up in periscope to consider it. The airstream is easterly, like last year. The ground is hard after a dry summer, a hard spring. The first night we sleep badly, then better the second, and better than at home, the third.

Before we started coming to Castle Island we went to the Upper Lake, Killarney, and before that, Derrynane. We left a 5p coin under a stone, as pledge of next year's visit. These have been our summer places for the past 35 years. Living on the ground and staring at the sky, the horizon, cooking on a fire.

The optimist's daughter is a meditation on daughterhood and belonging. Laurel revisits her home turf after the death of her father. She faces his insensitive new young wife of only a year or two. She is met at the station by her six bridesmaids, as they still are although her husband was killed in the war. Six bridesmaids who go on through death and divorce, bridesmaids till death. And the house full of her past.

Firelight and warmth—that was what her memory gave her. Where the secretary was now there had been her small bed, with its railed sides that could be raised as tall as she was when she stood up in bed, arms up to be lifted out.

Her father's new wife has left dribbles of nail varnish on her father's desk. She has emptied drawers. Taken over. The house is hers now. Laurel follows suit, burning letters, abandoning mementoes. The novel is a slow song of taking leave from your old life. Before she leaves, a chimney swift flies from room to room, knocking into things.

It is true that the starkest sense of home is the one you've left. Laurel's mother's 'up home', in the mountains of West Virginia, is the one you live in but hardly know.

A bit like Castle Island.