To the Editor:
In July of 1980 I washed ashore here with three young kids and no money. We spent our first summer in my grandmother’s house on Waban Park, with my two girls and I stuffed into one bedroom. My youngest daughter, then 6, slept in a large crib in the room. My son shared a room with various other boys as they came and went on vacation with their families.
I found a winter rental easy enough, and it was cheap. We moved in and enjoyed a very good winter there, but spring brought a huge problem. Where were we to live when May 31st arrived and our lease was done?
We experienced the Vineyard shuffle for the next four years.
That first winter we were having family counseling, and the counselors had my kids draw pictures of the house they wanted to move into. A huge waste of time, since there was no house. Year-round rentals were just not available, especially for someone with no money.
During May, a friend slapped together two rooms over his brother’s cesspool garage. No windows, not even a door. We hung a blanket over the doorway. No stove. No refrigerator. No running hot water. An illegal dwelling. We borrowed furniture and crammed all our belongings in. My kids had bikes, so I bought a bike for myself and those became our transportation, since I had no car. We treated the experience as an adventure, and spent a lot of our time at the beach. Fortunately, the owner kept the cesspool trucks outside every night, so the smell was minimal.
After another winter rental, we landed back in the cesspool garage, with improvements. My brother-in-law added a door to our second-floor abode, and the owner added a stove and refrigerator down in the garage area. Our food shared the fridge with the beer belonging to the various cesspool truck drivers. There was still no running hot water. Again, we tried to make it an adventure.
My parents were here that summer, taking care of my grandmother and running the family business my grandparents had started here back in the 1940s. I finally had a steady job with them.
The following spring found us facing homelessness, as the cesspool garage was no longer available to us. I had no idea where we would go until just a few days before we had to be out of our winter rental. We ended up in a tent at Martha’s Vineyard Family Campground, but it was only good for two weeks. Fortunately, a small travel trailer was located and purchased, and we were able to remain in the campground all summer. One adult and three kids in a 15-foot travel trailer and a 12-by-12 tent. With all our belongings. A new adventure. The trailer had a stove. There was a bathroom, but we didn’t hook it up, so we walked a quarter-mile to the communal bathrooms belonging to the campground … where we also took showers. Our beds remained out all the time, so we had no table to eat at. I wrote a silly poem about our circumstances that we shared with anyone who cared to listen.
Winter found us in a small rental house on West Chop. My son’s bedroom wasn’t much more than a closet, and the girls shared a room. When that didn’t work, I set up a corner of the dining room as a bedroom for my youngest girl. We limped through the winter. And summer, our fifth summer on MV, found us back at the M.V. Family Campgrounds in our trailer and tent. It no longer felt like much of an adventure. I carried laundry to the laundromat on my bike. I did the grocery shopping on my bike. I biked to work every day. My parents had bought the family business, so the one solid thing I had in my life was my job there.
We returned to the same winter rental on West Chop the winter of ’84-’85. The landlord actually came looking for me to see if I wanted the place again. I did. That winter I slept in the living room, since my girls couldn’t seem to share a room. I was dreading spring. But at that point, my parents had seen enough. In the spring they went house hunting, and purchased a house on East Chop. A house big enough for them to live in also. And even though the closing was not going to be until mid-June, the kids and I moved in June 1st as part of the purchase agreement.
I do have a question about how rentals work, though. When a lease ends on May 31 and the new rental doesn’t begin until June 1, what does one do for that one night of homelessness? The former tenant was still washing floors and collecting the last of her belongings at 10 pm as we were moving in. We slept in the basement our first night, since we were too tired to rearrange anything.
It’s now 32 years later. My life has changed several times. I moved out of the house after three years, spent one summer living with a friend and taking care of her children overnight while she worked, lived in another winter rental, did a stint as a live-in caregiver for an elderly woman, even moved off-Island twice for brief periods. My kids grew up and left home. I remarried and had another child. We moved back into my parents’ home in 1998, and cared for them as they aged and passed away. Now the house is part of my father’s estate, and has to be sold. The estate has to be split five ways, and we don’t have the money to buy everyone else out. At 67, am I ready to indulge myself in the Vineyard shuffle again? No year-round rentals are appearing. Everyone keeps asking if we’ve found a place, and have we looked here or done this or that? It’s exhausting to even think about. An adventure? How could I have ever thought that?
Yet … God has never left me completely homeless, living on the streets. He has always provided something, often at the last moment. A tent, a couch, my parents’ living room floor when we arrived back from Texas. A friend’s guesthouse for a month. A room in another friend’s home when I was expecting my fourth child. Not easy, but always a place to lay my head. I guess I’ll trust God to do it again this time. He knows exactly where I am to live next, and exactly when I will move there. All I really have to do is to trust him with my future.
Not always easy when you’re facing the dreaded Vineyard shuffle. Even winter rentals are no longer cheap.
Brenda Mastromonaco
Oak Bluffs
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