Charlie Alia offered my father a week at his summer cottage, a wooden house of two floors with no plumbing, no electricity and no insulation, plunked on a sand dune on Plum Island; it would be our first of two summer vacations at the ocean, and it was a memorable one. I loved Plum Island, the miles of open ocean, the surf, the sand dunes. Walking for miles along the dunes . . . Standing with my father as he cast into the surf in hopes of catching a striped bass or a bluefish. . . Going deep sea fishing with my father and catching a pail full of mackerel! My father used to love to tell the story of my getting a bite on the end of my line, and my pulling on the fishing line so hard that the mackerel came flying out of the water still attached to my line, swung behind me and smacked the man (who was fishing from the opposite side of the deep sea fishing boat) on the back of his sunburned neck. He came out swinging, wanting to punch out the guy who had done that, but all he found was a little 8 year old girl.
I loved the old wooden ice box and the iron hand pump (it was painted red!) in the kitchen of that cottage and was delighted to help my mother pump the water, the hand pump being the only source of our water for a week. (We bathed in the ocean!) And most of all I didn't love the outhouse -- my first experience with one! Phew!
We all had very bloody crucifixes hanging on the matchboard wooden walls above our beds. That was a first! Kind of scary for us kids.
When we first arrived on the island, I noticed a cute wooden church on the west side of the main road, the road that would lead to the cottage; I asked if we could go to that church tomorrow which was Sunday. It was then that I learned that all churches are not alike and that no, we would not be attending church that Sunday, probably the only Sunday we ever missed. As it turned out, I never did visit the Plum Island Roman Catholic Church, and now it's been torn down, making way for yet another megamansion.
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