We're done.

We said goodbye to the island painter on Sunday night, after the unfortunate Red Sox finale. We watched the last three ALCS games with him, bringing a half batch each night; like the players on screen, sports viewers fall easily into superstitious routines. Game 5 was such a fortuitous come-back that our presence and the cookies that came with us were partly credited. We were invited back and for game 6 the cookies worked again. But for game 7 our luck and our white flour had run out (we made them with all whole wheat flour) and the painter's parting words had an edge of resentment -- the beer had run out the night before and I think the cookies less well-suited the sober outcome of the series.

And then yesterday, we put the finishing touches on the deck, the trim, a screen door and the banister we've been painting, with interruptions, since August. We said goodbye to our neighbor, a man in his seventies or eighties who we'd only spoken to a few times briefly but who said he would miss us. I thought the people on the island were secretive, loners who kept to themselves, and in many ways they are, but there grows a certain companionship in proximate isolation. Watching our neighbor walk by, looking for his dog, waving from the top of the ladder, admiring from a distance the stained shingles he hangs to dry on clotheslines on his porch, and his admiring our work, calling out an encouraging word from the road or just stopping to look, we've become friends of a sort. I will miss him too.

We were pretty much out of food but in the hour before the ferry Stewart scrounged together the last of our peanut butter, a half stick of butter and apricot jam for the egg (flour, sugar, baking soda too) to make a small batch of crumbly peanut butter cookies. We ate them off the tray, finished the milk and that was it. I turned off the power to the stove and hot water heater, we shut the lights and locked the doors. It was too dark to admire the paint job as we walked away, dragging our ladders on a cart to the dock. On our way, we stopped at the island handyman's house to tell him we were going and to ask him to turn off the water in our house for the winter.

We return to the island tomorrow afternoon for the final stretch of work, it's taken a lot out of us, I think the stress is making me sick, my stomach has been hurting for the last three weeks. Someone tried to blame all the cookies I've been eating.