I found myself on the defensive when I first heard the accusation.

“I am not a clumper!” I told my cousin Glenn.

“But you are,” he retorted. “You moved to the Vineyard and started clumping your off-Island jaunts together.”

Glenn, who lived in a six-story walkup for twenty years, claims to have well-honed insights into clumper mentality. “I learned early on that I could carry more down the stairs than up,” he explained over dinner one evening. “If I took my laundry to the cleaners, I’d be empty-handed on the way back up and would use the opportunity to shop for groceries.” Having established his own clumping credentials, he said he’s worried that I’ve turned into a compulsive clumper. A problem clumper.

I argued that visiting relatives in Connecticut and friends in Boston and Maine on a work-related trip to New York didn’t qualify me as a compulsive clumper. And so what if I also throw in a few movies, a museum, a quick stop at BJs, and dinner at a Thai restaurant in Cambridge? All it means is that I plan sensibly.

After all, travel to and from the Vineyard is expensive and time consuming.

And it’s also emotionally draining. Attempting to get off-Island awakens my long-dormant adolescent mood swings. I’ve had temper tantrums when I can’t get a ferry reservation – like the Steamship Authority clerk really cares when I threaten to sell my house and move off the Island. If I do get the reservation I desire, my elation is such that I can barely breathe. Hours of celebration follow. I brag about my good fortune until my car gets relegated to one of the far-side slots on the ferry, as it always does.

But Glenn maintains that my method of planning can be likened to going into the kitchen for breakfast and, since you’re already there, eating lunch, dinner, and a few snacks. It isn’t healthy.

So when a friend mentioned she was going to California for two weeks, and while off-Island, would also go to Washington, DC, I asked, “Why?”

 “The hardest thing about leaving the Island is getting off,” she said. “While I’m off, I want to traverse as much of the country as I can.”

Makes sense to me.

But now, as I desperately try to merge trips to Nantucket; New York; Boston; Greenwich and Glastonbury, Connecticut; Washington, DC; Haverford, Pennsylvania; and possibly France into one, or at the most, two mega-trips, I realize I may have a clumping problem after all.

I seem unable to reconcile myself to the possibility that it can’t be done. I figure and refigure and move trips around like chess pieces. No coherent plan emerges, yet I refuse to admit defeat. I can’t stop.

I find myself clumping like a crazy woman.