I spent my childhood summers combing the beaches and playing in the fields and mountain meadows of Salt Spring Island on Canada’s west coast. Both sets of my grandparents lived there in country cottages with expansive gardens. My great-aunt and -uncle and some other relatives by marriage also resided on the island. My father’s sister and her husband and my four cousins lived on a sheep farm just down the big hill from the house my grandfather built at the base of Mount Maxwell. I envied them.

Salt Spring was relatively undiscovered then. My brothers and sisters and I would catch the ferry from Tsawwassen, near Vancouver, and feel the city’s clutches slipping away as we crossed the Strait of Georgia, often reaching “our” island under cover of night. The darkness didn’t matter as I could find my way along the single road blindfolded.

It was here one summer in my early twenties that I attended the marriage of my cousin. Weddings on Salt Spring were wondrous things; we knew almost all the kids who lived on the island, and these social “barn dance” events were often accompanied by bonfi res on the beach that lasted until the wee hours of the morning. I best remember my cousin from years earlier when her family and ours had a great summer bonfi re on one of the island’s many beaches, which were then usually deserted. We ate oysters that we had plucked from the shallow shores that afternoon and shucked while we sat warming our toes and fi ngers by the fire and gazing up at a star-filled sky. As an awestruck nine-year-old, I remember my cousin throwing back her long flowing dark hair and swallowing raw oysters one after another, then laughingly challenging us to do the same.