Self-published, 2003
“Shipboard Romances,” “The Art of Opening Up,” “The Monkey,” “Island Rules and Regulations,” “It Takes an Island – to give a wedding.” The names of the essays tell you what kind of book you’re reading. More Memories could only have been written by someone who knows “her” island – in this case Matinicus – intimately, and who loves the place without reservation.
“The Art of Opening Up” is my favorite. While it’s a straightforward description of the steps involved in opening up a summer place that has been closed for months, this eight-page essay is really a distillation of decades of summers; the details are so finely described that only someone who has been unboarding the windows, tinkering with the propane tanks, getting the water system to work, de-winterizing the fireplace, starting a garden and going through all the other rituals associated with an island summer home could have written them down so accurately. “We get slower each year but so what?” she concludes. “We do get it all done.”
“It Takes an Island – to give a wedding” is another good one. Maloney tells the story of a young couple who came to Matinicus to be married – alone and away from their families, or so they thought. But as the days go by they make friends, and by week’s end everyone on the island is pitching in to throw what turns out to be a big wedding for them.
There are poems as well, many about friends and relationships. “It is the poetry that gives me the greatest pleasure,” Maloney writes. “While writing it, and re-reading it, I feel a warm glow and for a few minutes I am sitting on the rocks in my front yard looking out over the harbor.”
More Memories is Maloney’s second Matinicus collection. She published her first, Memories from Harbor View Pathway, several years ago.
Copies are available from:
Margret V. Maloney
30 Sundance Lane
Bluffton, SC 29909 t