Those of you who have been reading my column for awhile know that every year I return to the summer cottage on Martha’s Vineyard that has been in the family since 1962. I try to write a few columns ahead of time while still breathing Ballard air, but after a few weeks the 97 percent humidity wipes my brain clean and I regress to my Massachusetts roots.

In the midst of the everyday drama that’s inescapable with nine people in a flimsy cottage packed between another 350 cottages in similar circumstances, my family always asks, “Are you going to write about this?”

Sometime they are asking to be helpful, other times it is out of fear. (The view from the upstairs bathroom looks out directly over the outdoor shower).

There are moments (many) that add new definitions to “living out loud.” We answer our phone when it is the neighbor’s phone that is ringing and sometimes give ourselves away by laughing at things we weren’t meant to hear.

But, mostly we all sit around on each other’s front porches between dramatic episodes. One day it was the Obama motorcade on the street behind the house and a runaway pit bull in the front. We could only hope the two didn’t meet because we sensed the dog would lose.

There was a wedding performed a few porches down and a birthday party that became an impromptu juggling and unicycle-riding lesson.

The best spontaneous gathering on the porch was the morning after our next-door neighbor was the server when the Obamas dined at the restaurant where she was working for the summer. Roused from our beds with the threat (later proved untrue) that she was "only going to tell it once," we gathered at Pam’s feet like children on the first day of kindergarten, gazing up at teacher.

When the President and his family left the island, we thought we were going to settle into the relative calm of nightly skunk visits, fruit fly infestation and the Labor Day exodus, but suddenly the word on everyone’s lips was “Earl.”

Funny, I thought, Emily and I have been working for weeks on that yard over on Earl Avenue. What’s this Earl?

Earl was the potential hurricane working its way up from the Caribbean with the potential to hit the entire eastern seaboard and the island by Friday. We don’t get hurricanes in Ballard, and it seems that the fiercest wind and snow storms are the ones we don’t see coming. Would Earl really hit?

By Wednesday, the towns had activated a system known as Reverse 9-1-1, whereby every household receives an automated phone call announcing “Code Red” with instructions on hurricane precautions and information on when and where emergency shelters would open.

The level of preparedness was unprecedented in the lifetime of anyone alive. Between the Internet and the telephone system, the citizens had never been so forewarned about a storm’s approach; in due time the battery-buying and water purchases went from desultory to frantic.

The night before the hurricane was due, the five island towns prepared for lockdown. All the hanging signs on businesses were removed. Those in the boat hauling business were working round the clock, and people were stock-piling food.

The day dawned with a horrible yellow tint and even greater humidity. Under emergency orders, all businesses were to be closed by 2 p.m., and everyone was forbidden to drive. Meanwhile, the hurricane was losing its strength and starting to drop in its precious categories, 4-3-2-1-downgraded to tropical storm.

But, storm preparation was not so uneasily undone. Hotels had evacuated. The stores and libraries had closed (with the bars, in particular, threatened with fines and potential arrest). No day was ever longer as we waited and waited, windows boarded over, ice trays filled, lawn furniture removed. It was the only day of an eventful vacation when nothing happened.

The shelters stayed empty. The emergency workers imported from as far away as Pennsylvania weren’t needed, and no one stopped our car when my mother took me driving just before midnight on the abandoned streets that were finally being lashed with horizontal rain and wind enough to shake the Honda.

By morning there were giant puddles but very little debris. The sun seemed especially bright on a just-scrubbed landscape. The main street was a gauntlet of plywood coming down and signs going back up, ladders everywhere.

Obama was gone. Earl had been scared off. It was back to the business of front porch drama and breathing in the sights and sounds that seem more than a world away from Ballard.