On our way out of the door heading to a one-week vacation in Maine in August, hurrying to get packed after a busy day of work, I unraveled like a rope on an unattended winch, and lashed out at Chris for no good reason. Then I cried in the café car on the train ride north.

On the ferry to Peak’s Island the captain warned us to cover our ears before letting rip a blast of the horn but I jumped as if I hadn't heard his words, still taut with city nerves. On one of the island's dirt roads I jumped again, like in a cartoon, when I nearly stepped on a fat smashed snake carcass.

Yet my new-geography jumpiness gave me a new and welcome focus, distracting me from whatever important worries I thought I had. After dinner in town our first evening, we took a wrong turn at two stone pillars and had to double back in the pitch dark woods, guided only by a pearly light where the trees parted overhead. It was all I thought about. The sound of our feet hitting pebbles was magnified and we concentrated on staying on the path. When we finally reached the cabin door, and fumbled in the dark with a sticky lock, I giggled with relief.

The next day we meandered along a sunlit grassy path, climbed a little hill then plunged through a doorway covered in garish graffiti into a dank World War II bunker. Chris wandered ahead of me in a long cement tunnel, hands clasped behind his back, then disappeared.

“Come back!” I said, feeling panicked, like the picnicking Brits in a Merchant Ivory film, until he materialized at the other end in a perfect square of light. That afternoon we hiked five miles around the perimeter of the island, and cut our tired feet as we gingerly waded through burnt sienna algae, encountering sharp rocks and shells exposed at low tide.

The physical challenges of living on an island were offset by our lamp-lit accommodations in a genuine cottage with its stash of mysteries and identification books such as The Birdwatcher’s Companion. The house smelled of wicker and wood. It had porches on its east and west sides, a faucet that dripped until you found the sweet spot and a mouse that scrabbled in the crack above the fireplace. It came with a scribbled longhand note about delicate plumbing. I found playing cards, a glass ashtray, a 1986 edition of Life Magazine and instructions for the toaster oven in the coffee table drawer. Faded puzzles lived on a low corner shelf underneath the lamp.

In the distance the foghorn was low, muted and despondent but the constant chirrup and squeak of birds brightened our lazy afternoons as we sat on one of the cool, shady porches, covered in blankets, with a plain brown donut and coffee.

Fortunately, the cottage was not wired for internet and the library was open odd hours that I kept missing, so we read books and sewed and painted. I was grateful for the limited choices in the cottage kitchen, a room so familiar it might have been my own grandmother’s kitchen: the scorched wooden cutting board, the battered metal pots, the cast-iron skillet, the sugar we had to chisel loose with a knife. I was calmed by the limited selection of spices and herbs—coriander, cloves, nutmeg, basil and sage—and a good-old McCormick saltshaker. A lime green Pyrex bowl and mismatched plates filled me with nostalgia, as did the metal cabinet doors that went chi-chunk.

In our snug bedroom we latched the window to the ceiling by chain and hook so we could feel the drafty air and snuggled under the comforter. Our last night I stared mesmerized, watching the skylight above become pockmarked by rain.

At dawn on our last day the sun slowly brought definition to the trees framed in the windows, like a photograph in a darkroom, until we were enveloped in green. My eyes opened and closed, opened and closed, and I sighed deeply, like coming out of a meditation, every trace of pre-vacation agitation gone.