Having the entire summer off on Martha’s Vineyard sounds like a dream come true to most people, but not so much for me. Truth be told, I’m having a hard time adapting since the last three decades and counting has entailed getting up at dawn and heading off to work seven days a week during the spring and summer months and for half those years pretty much all year long.

The prospect of a leisurely morning coffee with a friend on the porch of the Chilmark Store seemed like a decent way to ease into my new life, which is to say unexpectedly and suddenly unemployed. It turned out to be anything but. I felt oddly out of place amid the swirling hive of activity that seemed to emanate from the place. A steady stream of cars angled for parking spaces, the screen door slammed nonstop and people in an obvious hurry came and went. My chair shook as the porch reverberated with their steps. The sleepy store I remembered with a potbelly stove and a few crates of produce on the porch was long gone.

With my nerves jangled by so much activity I set out for the weekly antique sale at the West Tisbury Grange. The pace was certainly more tolerable considering my diminished state. I browsed for a while until I spotted a slim volume of photographs simply titled Martha’s Vineyard, and started flipping through it. Many of the old black and white pictures were of familiar Island scenes but they seemed borrowed from a bygone era. I checked the front page and saw that it was published in 1970 which coincidentally was the first year I washed up on these shores. I mention that, not in an attempt to garner venerability but just as a statement of fact. I never actually planned to live on the Island but life unfolds according to its own plan for better or worse. By 1985 it was my permanent home and I built a house, tended a flock of goats and fished an awful lot — probably too much — before I launched a series of restaurants, built a brewery and finally ended up running a lively farm stand.

For me, it was a perfect time but the people I met often lapsed euphoric about the way it used to be. For some of them it was as recent as the sixties. I had narrowly missed the horse races and the demolition derby held up in Gay Head. It was different back then, they claimed. It was a magical time for them and inherent in their wistful voices was the fact that it had all changed. Something had been lost. For others, the special time was the fifties and for even older folks the halcyon days ended before the Second World War. I read oral histories of up-Islanders sailing over to New Bedford for food and supplies because it was easier than the arduous trip down to Holmes Hole by horse or oxcart. What a place it must have been! In much older photos I came across, I marveled at the Island bereft of trees, a time when sheep outnumbered people and small houses dotted the up-Island landscape sparsely. Even though I had missed out on that mythical heyday, they each described I found more than enough raw material to build my own.

I looked closely at the pictures in the book that day and noticed that there were many unpaved lanes and byways, even in downtown Edgartown, and those pictures immediately conjured up the pleasant perfume of roses mixed with the delightful stink of crushed scallop shells underfoot. I felt like a latter-day Proust and the Madeleine that unlocked a flood of memories. I guess when a requisite number of years pile up around you, thoughts tend to settle more on the past, sweet memories colored no doubt by longing, nostalgia and the remembrance of lost time.

Summer days seem different to me now. Time used to drift and meander and occasionally almost come to a complete standstill not all that long ago. That hardly seems the case anymore and I have my own theory about why. Too many cars and too many people in a mad dash certainly play a large part. At the risk of sounding like a Joni Mitchell lyric, I still long for the unselfconscious gentleness of empty unpaved lanes that didn’t need curbs, sidewalks and so many signs delegating 15-minute parking.

When I left the Grange hall and headed home, I spotted a makeshift stand at the end of a dirt road selling eggs and flowers. It looked like a lemonade stand and it was manned by three adolescents, each hunched over and completely engrossed in their little handheld gadgets. As I passed without them noticing me I began to wonder about what they’ll look back on. Of course, they’ll fashion their own version of halcyon days; The great summer of 2017 on the Vineyard and for them at least, the heyday. It will probably seem as picture perfect as my own version. They’ll lament the changes as they recall the simpler times of their youth. Certainly, a more perfect time for all of us.

Robert Skydell lives in Chilmark.