Free in D.C.

For an entire, glorious month this summer, I have rented a house on Martha’s Vineyard, an act that makes me the first person in my family to make a sane summer vacation decision. I grew up in the Mississippi Delta, a place where the average high temperature in July is ninety-three degrees and where the low rarely dips below seventy-three. Worse, the humidity level hovers at 94 percent. On a website called climatemps.com, the summers of my birthplace are described as “hot and muggy with thunderstorms.” Despite these facts—or, now that I think about it, in defiance of them—we steadfastly refused to head north (to lovely, chilly Maine, say, or perhaps Rhode Island), choosing instead the almost identical climate of Destin, Florida, except that the lows there drop no further than seventy-seven.

Don’t get me wrong—we loved it. We loved the one-story Frangista motel, where the banging screen doors were just a few running steps from the water. We loved hanging out on the beach all day and crabbing by night. We loved the carefree, uncrowded nature of the place before it got so built up with near skyscrapers it started looking like the Gulf Coast version of Atlantic