The following essay won first prize in the Della Hardman Day student essay contest.

Since the first time I stepped onto this Island, or was rather carried, I was thrust into strong arms bonded by love. I am a washashore by true Islander standards, but an Islander at heart.

I was adopted from China when I was 14 months old. I was greeted at the Steamship Authority docks in Vineyard Haven with signs and cheers as I was welcomed into this foreign place, across the oceans, and surrounded by sea. The community that welcomed me was the community of Martha’s Vineyard, one that is hard to explain to another when it is all you have ever known.

Here is a place where the weight on one’s shoulders is made just a little bit lighter by the net of neighbors who lighten that load. A community of communities on this Island give and then give more.

The first community on the Island that I grew to be part of is at Grace Episcopal Church, just a half mile from the docks of Vineyard Haven. It was here that I, too, became a giver and also felt the effects of receiving.

As soon as I was able to walk straight without dropping dishes, I was put on plate collection duty at every Friday’s community supper at Grace Church. Of course, this was not official, not required, but my mother thought I ought to help in some way. I came to learn many faces, and then the names that belonged to those faces.

Yes, I was given some time to help clear dishes, but I was given a warm meal and my single-mother was given a night off from cooking. In that, I’ve come to appreciate the everlasting ebb-flow cycle of this Island’s generosity, as if the waves breaking on the shore just to return to the sea have entranced the Island in a mystical moon-dance.

I see this in other places too. I see it in the neighbor who plows the driveways of every family on my street in the winters, or the tradesman who surprised my mother with a closet after I simply baked him brownies. We are a community ready to give.

And between each and every one of us, we share in our giving and in the nature that connects us all. The state forest knits the heart of the Island together, while walking paths lead Islanders out and out and out to the sea. Our meadows and salt marshes dance in the wind, calling each to be an explorer of their home — of our home.

One may see this place as a bubble, protected from the outside world, or a prison, detached and remote from society. Whichever way you see it, and maybe it’s somewhere in between, we are a community that depends on one another. We are that net of neighbors that hold each other up through the bursting of summer, all the way through the frozen winter nights.

We are ambassadors of a borrowed land from Indigenous peoples who have been and continue to be at the forefront of environmental protection and justice. We depend on no one but us to preserve the heart of this Island that is the nature that surrounds us and keeps telling us to give and to share — in resources, in responsibility, and in love.

Della Hardman Day takes place in Ocean Park on Saturday, July 29 beginning at 4 p.m.