My uncle George sees the gulls flying overhead as Japanese bombers over Pearl Harbor. I tell him that one looks like the airplane coming in low and fast over Greenwich Street headed for the World Trade Center. We are sitting on a pristine deck looking out over the blue Atlantic. There is nothing but ocean, a flat horizon line and blue skies—a clean slate for the imagination. We bring our history with us wherever we go.

We are on Block Island. It is the end of June and the beginning of another summer. My family has gathered on this island, in our helter-skelter fashion, to be together by the sea, as we did for so many summers on Fire Island at my aunt’s house. After her stroke and her husband’s death, she moved to New England to be closer to her grown children.

Block Island is a more civilized version of our old Fire Island, where we went barefoot all summer as children and teens. Here, cars are allowed, although most people get around on two wheels or on foot. The houses are of a kind, mostly, with cedar-shingled sides and white trim on two-acre lots. Stone walls punctuate the landscape. I am told they were built by slaves. They are not the finely-stacked walls my husband builds. It is hard to imagine them surviving a Nor’easter, but they have, for hundreds of years. Stone of all sizes is haphazardly piled together, as if in a race to finish, up to four feet high. Local lore says if a slave built a fence across the island, they would win their freedom.

We are staying in the home of my cousin’s significant other. It is famous on Block Island (and beyond) because it was designed for the owners, Weld Coxe and Mary Hayden, by Robert Venturi. Coxe’s son Don was assigned by his father to build the house when he was only 20 years old. It is a post-modern version of the cedar shake New England cottage. It bears the same gray and white facade of its neighbors, but the similarity is only skin-deep. It was designed from the outside in, Don tells me. His father used a hand-drawn sketch to communicate his vision to Venturi, who then adopted his own post-modern ideas to the project. I can imagine building a house as a 20-year-old would be challenging enough without having to deal with Venturi’s penchant for diverging angles and curious window placements. But the house is now a badge of honor for Don, as well as an eminently comfortable domain.

It looks out over Sachem Pond on the southern tip of the island. In the morning, a procession of white sails heads out to the open ocean. In the evening, the setting sun floods the sky with a new image every day.

Our family gathers in shifts, over two weeks, as schedules allow. There are seven of us here now, in two houses. This week no one is under 50. My aunt, once the dominant force in the kitchen, and elsewhere, is content to let the younger women collaborate on meals. We grill swordfish and copious amounts of vegetables. My husband juices fresh limes for cocktails. My aunt and her brother, my uncle George, sit on the deck, bundled against the ocean breezes, watching the surf come in. Speech is hard for them now, but they are as close as they were as children, when only my aunt could understand her little brother’s peculiar gibberish. They don’t need words anymore. They have their history, and their family all around them.