The old writer’s cabin on a hill in Menemsha was the needle in the haystack of summer housing and included a few caveats: there was no running water, no bathroom and no furniture. No problem, I thought, remembering falling in love years earlier with someone in their A-frame summer cabin.

I found an old Ikea futon in a friend’s basement. I dragged the shelves people hated anyway in my coworking space up the hill, and populated those shelves with a three-gallon water vessel, a bucket and a lot of animal feed. I had baby wipes for cleaning my feet of mud and poison ivy before bed, (the poison ivy won) and eventually also dragged up there my clothes, a desk, some moldy old chairs, a plant, two lamps, some pillows and a few accents. It was glamping at its finest, and most importantly it offered me a place, alone, to sleep through the summer. I woke up to wild turkeys, to the sound of bells on the harbor, to parties and deejay’s at neighboring mansions. And I woke to rain and strange bugs that emitted electric currents or caught themselves in my hair.

I know the Island’s housing problem well despite having the privilege of a family with a home of their own. I vacated the house for them come summer and joined the throngs of people I know who live in a yurt for the summer, or a trailer parked in a field, or a cabin, or a boat or a tent while their house is occupied by renters, or while they search for housing anew. It’s par for the Island shuffle course but I felt, for a good while in that cabin, like I was living in the lap of luxury.

Friends said they envied the cabin. I didn’t tell them about the long walk I took, almost half a mile, with a flashlight at night, or how I was sure the writers from the past haunted this cabin. I didn’t mention the termites, or the feeling I was an illegal squatter (I wasn’t), or how I kept finding things like razor blades or shattered glass around the property. They were the leftovers from the builder, but on a haunted foggy humid mildew-rich day discovering razors and glass told their own stories. I lay awake in the middle of the night sometimes wondering what it was out there, in the woods, in the cabin, thickness, heaviness, a story I wasn’t clear about and I knew needed to be told.

It wasn’t bonfires and bikinis and weed, it wasn’t summer lovers or sailing trips, lobster bakes by the water or dance parties in group houses this summer. It was a cabin, the sweetness of solitude, the oddity of stepping willfully into the challenges of living in nature and living with what was inside of me. My sister visited and she loved it. My friend Zada stopped by, joked about how it looked like Anthropologie threw up in there. High end camping. I felt determined to declare I had spent next to nothing on the furnishings, mainly a bed frame I bought at Chicken Alley thrift shop for $25, so fewer bugs would crawl on me in my sleep, and the animal feed for the composting toilet. She laughed at me for quantifying the prices.

But when my father, all 6’4” and 250 pounds of him walked up the hill and into my magic cabin, he looked befuddled.

“Look,” I said, “that bucket is my toilet!” I was so proud. I am half princess and have always been terrible at camping, even if I love the outdoors.

“Merissa,” my Dad said in the car driving back to his house where he would ask me to watch old videos of my Polish grandmother speaking of her life before I knew her. “This is how your grandparents lived in slave labor camps in Siberia. Why are you living in a cabin?”

How could I explain the yurts and campers and the way the shuffle worked? How could I explain to my self-made father, who was born in 1945 soon after D-Day and raised in a refugee camp in Germany before arriving with false papers to New York in 1950, my father who knew poverty and built up his life of comfort, that I was sleeping in this cabin instead of the basement of his glorious house because I loved the sound of the animals, trees, ocean and rain. I tried.

We got home and he insisted, for days until I acquiesced, that I watch videos of my grandmother speaking about Siberian labor camps where she was kept in slave captivity for two years before my father was born in Uzbekistan. My hippie glam campout summer was now heavy as the middle of the night fog, and those ghosts of dead writers and movie makers who used to write in the cabin I slept in, they had nothing on the ghosts of dead family buried in mass graves.

My family’s history in Europe came up daily this summer. Not like Anglo-Saxon white supremacy, the way my skin tells the story, but the bottom of the barrel kill ‘em if you can erase a people kind of stink. I realized how present it was, more than I had ever noticed during my years of trauma research, war inquiry, Jewish history and religious inquiry. I realized that I lived a daily life growing up with the awareness not just of a grave, but a mass grave.

Eventually I moved back into my parents’ house. I tried to go back to the cabin after my father’s visit but it got wet and moldy in the storms, the termites dropped endless droppings everywhere, one day I found maggots in the toilet and mold on my toothbrush. The romance of cleaning my feet with baby wipes, of learning to manage the details, coping with endless swathes of poison ivy all over me, sleeping without cell service, waking to no Wi-Fi, having a mini camping vacation inside of my own life, they stopped being romantic when they alluded to slavery, when they alluded to war.

I teach workshops across the country to children and grandchildren of genocide survivors. I forget though, in my fancy white life, in my vain attempts to fit into spaces that echo little of my inner narrative, that I am also one of those grandchildren, that residue of a war that ended in 1945 peppered my childhood daily.

This summer humbled me, in its heat, in its grandeur, reminding me over and over again of what lies beneath. I aim for frivolity, for a lightness I currently have forgotten, for camping and beach bonfires and dancing and easy gentle relationships. For now, I will relish the sweetness of the solitude fall promises, and the motion of sweeping up a cabin of its endless termite droppings. One that was, for a brief moment, all my own,

Merissa Nathan Gerson is a writer and educator based in Chilmark. Her work addresses the inheritance of trauma and memory across generations.