Not long ago my sister sent me the Zillow listing for our childhood home. My parents had sold the house some fifteen years ago. Now, my sister informed me, it had changed hands again. I flipped through the photo gallery, taking note of what had changed since we last crossed the threshold. A few walls had been knocked down and a mudroom had been added. The entire kitchen had been replaced. The old gardens had been razed. Most confounding, the pool had been filled in.

I had begun flipping through the photos with a sort of clinical detachment – how much did the new owners sell it for? When? What other changes had they made? But after a few minutes, my mood quickly shifted.

“I wish you didn’t send me this. I’m crying,” I texted my sister.

“I know. I’m sorry,” she replied. “It’s so weird.”

It wasn’t that I was missing the particulars of the house or my life in Connecticut, exactly. The Vineyard had long since come to feel like home. It’s just that almost every formative childhood memory had unfolded within those walls. It’s where I learned to read and to ride a bike. It’s where I routinely climbed a tree that I had named Tiffany, after my favorite character on The Mickey Mouse Club. It’s where my sisters and I raced toboggans while Dad set up fifteen-foot Christmas trees and Mom baked cakes to give to the neighbors. It’s where we raised and loved a dog, two cats, and a short-lived guinea pig, all of whom are buried in the backyard.

Flipping through those photos, seeing the evidence of someone else occupying the space I had once so intimately known but now barely recognized, I couldn’t help but feel as if those memories had been erased.

Deep down, I know this line of thinking isn’t logical. Almost every home has a storied past. That’s especially true of the homes featured in this issue. Take the hilltop house on page 26, which was once part of an 1885 Katama resort. When the resort closed, the cottage was disassembled and moved board by board to Chappaquiddick. It became a beloved multi-generation family home, then another boarding house. Now, once again, it’s a painstakingly restored and cherished family home.

The two immaculately decorated downtown-Edgartown houses on page 46 have also had multiple chapters and stewards. The latest pair of owners, both interior designers, thoughtfully redesigned their homes for modern family living by taking the original structures down to the studs.

As for me, I’ve left my own marks and memories in storied homes all over the Island. In the decade and a half since I’ve set down emotional roots, I’ve shuffled through nearly a dozen Vineyard homes, including in-town apartments, wooded cottages, an upside-down Katama bungalow, a lagoon-front cabin, and a sprawling up-Island retreat with fantastic wintertime ocean views.

Some of my most indelible recent memories have unfolded in my most transitional quarters. The former schoolhouse where I got engaged, for instance, was my home for just a few months. The same goes for the two-bedroom West Tisbury cottage where I mourned my father in law and hunkered down while the pandemic raged on.

If the walls could talk, they’d tell my stories and those of so many others: the big ones, the small ones, the ones that have yet to end. They seep into the corners of our minds, in the land, and in the beams. They nestle in the studs. They endure, even when everything else is rearranged and knocked down.