Emulating the ant and rockin’ the grasshopper, at solstice time

SUMMER ARRIVES this week, the season when islanders like me try to blend the virtues of the ant and the grasshopper.

The Aesop’s Fable, you might recall, tells of the ants who spent their summer busily storing up food for the winter while their grasshopper neighbor spent all summer making music on his fiddle. By season’s end the grasshopper had good memories, and no doubt had polished up some catchy tunes, but faced a hungry winter ahead. When he asked for a handout, the ants told him to bugger off and go dance the winter away.

Therein lies the problem with old Aesop: His righteous protagonists can be mean-spirited bastards. But I digress.

Arriving at a happy medium in the ant-vs.-grasshopper industriousness quotient is my goal on Center Island. I also strive not to be as snotty as the ants.

Saturday, we had an island work party that hit just the right notes. I and 15 or so of my neighbors worked from 9 to noon on projects to preserve and prettify our community assets. I helped to scrape and repaint the railing on our upper dock, while some weed-whacked the boat yard and others did carpentry repairs on the clubhouse.

After three hours, we all gathered on the clubhouse deck for grilled brats and shared some island camaraderie and a pony keg of good IPA from Anacortes Brewery. Ants and grasshoppers. Too bad nobody brought a fiddle.

There’s lots to do around Nuthatch cabin this time of year. I continue to rebuild my deck a few planks at a time, with Lopez Island lumber-yard cedar ferried here on WeLike, 64-board-feet at a time. I try to restain one side of the cabin every summer. There’s lots of firewood to be split. And this summer I’m also doing projects related to my sailboat, Sogni d’Oro, in preparation for its sale.

Yes, an era is ending, as daughter Lillian and I have decided it’s time to find someone new to love the dear old Westsail 32, which has been ours since 1989. We have a prospective buyer, one of Lillian’s close friends in Seattle, someone who fits our hopes for a new steward who will give the boat care, energy, love and fresh adventures. I’ve promised a few restoration efforts first, and the sale depends on a satisfactory inspection, but hopes are high.

On Center Island, my summer routine has kicked in. I rise around 7 or 8, with coffee and a breakfast of avocado toast topped with walnuts. Once I’m dressed and more or less cleaned up (one doesn’t really need to shower unless you have visitors, right?) I often go for a bike ride (three brisk one-mile, through-the-woods laps of a route encircling our airfield), then devote a half-hour to a New York Times crossword before getting busy with some project for the day.

This past week that involved stripping the spoiled old varnish and refinishing the sailboat’s teak lightboards — beautiful craft pieces my father built 30 years ago to hold the boat’s big, vintage zinc-alloy running lights. I cut the wires, detached the boards from the boat’s shrouds and brought them to my island for refinishing. Two days with a heat gun and a sander, then two coats of a heavy-duty waterproofing wood finish. I’ve ordered cutout birchwood lettering from a manufacturer in Idaho to match the Westsail’s sail emblem (a stylized capital W, with 32), which I’ll epoxy to the lightboards as my father did. He made the original cutouts by hand, bless him.

The refinishing project was a lot of work, but satisfying. And doing the work outside on my deck in the June sunshine, with wild foxgloves and oceanspray blooming nearby and twittering birds complementing the Jimmy Buffett tunes on my bluetooth speaker, wasn’t too painful. Galley Cat wandered by every few minutes to meow a hello and roll luxuriantly on the sun-warmed cedar deck.

That’s the antsy part of my day. The grasshopper kicks in around 5 when Galley and I indulge in what my daughter calls a “snooze read” (bedding down with a favorite book until one’s eyes close) up in the loft for a half-hour. Then it’s time for me to cook up a good dinner (tilapia tacos, say; maybe a stir-fry with fresh kale from my deck-rail planter) while cranking up more tunes and sipping a glass of good New Zealand sauvignon blanc from my monthly Costco run. The best offerings on Netflix often finish off the evening. (Even small islands nobody’s heard of get the internet these days. In fact, fiber-optic broadband is coming, we’re told. Yikes.)

That’s it. A day in the life of this antsy grasshopper on Center Island in the San Juans. Come 7:57 a.m. (PDT) Wednesday, happy summer solstice to my Northern hemisphere readers. Don’t forget your warm-weather chores. But remember to fiddle now and then, too. Maybe even dance.