Thirty-one years ago Jeff and I moved into a little house on Hatteras Island, here on the North Carolina Outer Banks. Raised in a Delaware suburb, I’d never lived in such a small town. I set about trying to meet our neighbors, who’d seen many outsiders like us come and go. They didn’t pay much heed to us, until it was clear that we were staying.
Bit by bit we were taken into a community of people who were very different from those I’d known before. They fished, ran small stores, repaired houses and cars, and cleaned cottages. They were more open than many of my former suburban neighbors and certainly less pretentious. What you saw was what you got. I loved this about them.
They were also much more conservative than me—which, it turned out, made absolutely no difference at all.
