Scillen

There are places on Kent Island where you can feel the weight of what was.

Love Point is one of them.

I remember the driveway before I remember the house.

Five hundred feet long. Narrow. Trees on both sides. 
The kind of road that makes you feel like you’re leaving something behind and heading into something older.

At the end of it sat Scillen.

Two stories of brick. Five windows across. Facing east, away from the Bay that had been trying to take it for years.
It had been standing since at least the 1840s. Maybe earlier.

I’d heard the stories since I was a kid. 

They said the house had been moved to escape the water. Not once. Twice. And on a blow-out tide, if you knew where to look, you could still see where it used to stand.

I was 18. Maybe 19. Joe Q and I had plenty of other options. We chose this. 

Old houses. Empty fields. Ghosts. UFOs. The occult. That was the kind of thing we chased.

Scillen had been sitting empty for years. No glass in the windows. No doors worth closing. Just a shell holding on out of habit.

We went in through the front.

The house was already giving itself back. Plaster gone. Framing exposed. Pieces of people’s past scattered across the floor. Not arranged. Not preserved. Just left.

You could feel it. Some of what happened here was never written down. It didn’t need to be.

Not in some mystical way. Just weight. The kind that comes from people living hard on a piece of ground for a long time.

***

That land had been worked since the 1600s. Granted in 1650 to Thomas Bradnox, a justice of the peace with enough standing to avoid punishment and enough reputation that people still remembered what he was. 

Brutal to the people under him.

That part of the story didn’t get recorded. It didn’t leave with him. It stayed here.

You can still see it if you know where to look.

The land passed through hands after that. Goodhands. Whites. Dennys.

Names change. The ground doesn’t.

***

We made our way upstairs. Every step was a gamble. Old timber. Wide spans. Nothing reinforced the way it would be now. The ceilings were higher than anything built today. Ten feet, maybe more.

At the top, the place opened up. Oak branches framed the view. The farm stretched toward the Chesapeake. The sun dropped low, dragging everything with it.

People pay for that now. Back then, it wasn’t bought. It was lived.

I turned. One step. A crack. Then nothing.

I went straight through the floor.

Caught myself on a timber just before the drop. Hanging over broken boards and rusted nails. Joe grabbed my arm. Slipped once. Caught again. Pulled me up just enough. I got the rest of the way out on my own.

That was enough. Not fear. Just understanding.

People talked about that place. Lights on when there was no power. Sounds. Stories passed down like a lecture.

People had been on that ground for thousands of years. Matapeake before the English.
Servants. Slaves. Farmers. Families.

Not all of them there by choice. Not all of them accounted for.

You don’t erase that. You build on it. And sometimes, it pushes back. There are parts of this island that were never properly marked. This is one of them.

Life moved on. Work. Money. All the things that pull you away from the places that made you.

***

Twenty years later, I found myself back out there. Same ground. Different reason.

Grapes now. Rows cut into the same soil that held everything before it. Whatever fed the people who lived here. Whatever was taken from the ones who didn’t have a say. It stayed in the dirt.

Chesapeake Manor Vineyard. Dorie and Jason.

Jason’s people trace back to the Goodhands. Same family that held this land when it was still called something else. Before it was divided, sold, renamed, and worn down by the Bay.

Dorie understands the land in a way most people don’t. She feels the weight. Doesn’t try to clean it up or turn it into something pretty. Just lets it be what it is.

That’s rare here now.

She wanted to save the old house, but those before her had already abandoned it. Left it to rot. It was too far gone.

So it disappeared like so many others on Kent Island do.

But the ground it stood on isn’t finished.

***

Wine gets talked about like it’s just flavor. Notes. Finish. Structure.

That’s surface.

Wine is time. A single year pulled out of the ground and held long enough to be remembered.

Some years don’t want to give anything at all. Weather turns. Crops fail. You take what you can get and keep going.

Dry years. Wet years. Good. Bad.
Each one different. Each one gone once it’s gone.

Harvest is what the land gives you when everything lines up. Light. Warmth. The part people want to remember.

Harbinger is the rest of it. What sits underneath. What doesn’t soften. The part that was already here before we ever thought to put grapes in the ground.

Same place. Same soil. Same story.

Whatever was built here is gone.

Whatever was buried here isn’t.

And now it grows. You taste it.