Steven and I moved to PEI on May 1, 2001. There was so much snow at our cottage, where we spent that first summer, that my mother had to hire my cousin to clear the lane with his tractor and snowblower. Collective amnesia and too much British pastoral poetry in our education system makes us believe that May 1 in PEI should be all spring flowers and tea on the terrace but, like this year and 2001, it’s often not.

While I’m considered to be from PEI (though regarded with slight suspicion by some because I spent nearly two decades in other places), Steven is, and always will be, “from away”, a term hated by some people who move to PEI and feel they are never really accepted. I get it, and try not to use it for fear of offending someone. I’m really from away, too, not being Miꞌkmaq, and if I was living where many of my ancestors were from, I would be having tea on a terrace in Devon or Dorset.

I heard one of the members of the band Wet Leg talking about growing up on the Isle of Wight and how people who are not born there are called overners, I suppose because they are from “over across”, as we on PEI sometimes refer to the mainland. I am an Islander with overner traits, I guess.