The Tenth Island: Finding Joy, Beauty, and Unexpected Love in the Azores

by Diana Marcum

In the Central Valley, each distant war and famine and dictatorship brought a new wave of immigrants to factory fields. Nothing is as global as a California farm town.

I was surrounded by the displaced. Most of what these people missed was lost forever to them,

Though I again felt a connection to something huge and beyond me, I was also set loose from everything familiar. And ever since, I’ve worried that in this great swirl of connecting dots, there isn’t a dot where I belong. I feared I was doomed to free float. It was the reason I liked immigration stories: place and separation and identity and figuring out what stayed put even when you didn’t.

in an extended family it sometimes seems as if no one listens.

“Oh, Princess. They cut the tree down. You have wings, so fly.”

He told me my light shone too bright for him.

“That’s right, and you just shine, shine, shine, girl. And remember that little man isn’t even a bed light.”

There’s nothing as sexy as laughing.”

Traditions and hanging on to old hierarchies could be very unkind to women or children or anyone without power.

“When you go on an adventure, just trust that you’ll meet who you need to meet and hear what you need to hear because the really important stuff, you just can’t plan.”

Mary had been crumbling with anxiety because she finally could.

We have this one life. But all the roads not taken, all those other lives we might have lived, are a part of it too. Yearning—that terrible, beautiful gaping yawn of want for a person, a place, a chance, a change, or something we can’t name—leaves craters, spaces for us to hold more of life. Saudade might be a strictly Portuguese word, but aching want is a universal condition.

it is a small island, and for many generations we must all live together all our lives, so it is the habit to always pass down the knowledge that would make us—how would you say?—cut each other some slack.”

I could see how she might want to go back to a young love she’d thrown over because of insecurities and say, “I grew into a stronger woman than that.” If for no other reason than to remind herself it was true.