The first weeks with my family on the East Coast I resist writing about constant domestic dramas involving skunks, shared sleeping space with six people and trying to get the trash out on time for pick-up. But the divide between my Ballard and Oak Bluffs worlds finally broke this morning when my mother told me about gathering our household waste at the local dump.

Martha's Vineyard still has town dumps; no one abides by the terms landfill or transfer station. When my grandfather was alive our cottage was furnished by the dump-salvaged mattresses, bicycle wheels, shawls for the dress-up box. The old days of pulling items from the pit are gone, although the towns themselves sell some of the treasures on-site. Tales of the dump were legend when I was young - antiques to be refinished, the box of 1957 license plates, chats with the likes of surgeons or plumbers.

The trash is picked up nowadays, twice a week during the summer months by the facilities crew at the former Methodist Camp Meeting Association where my parents have had a cottage for 45 years (when we get it out early enough). But recyclables still get stacked around the house and the yard waste bagged for the dump runs that my mother likes to make, trash can still be taken directly to the dump for a fee.

Once back in Seattle I rearrange my summer memories and attempt to forget the fruit flies, the constant dirty dishes in order to remember long days at the beach instead. After each near disaster my family asks warily "are you going to write about this?" Then there are the moments of charm: my father calling to my niece Sarah to show him how to turn on the hot water in the outdoor shower after the faucet snapped, 10 children trying to chase skunks off the front porch, nieces seeking shelter from the thunderstorm underneath my covers. But somehow it will be harder to dismiss the murkier memories - the tight quarters of cottage life makes one aware of every exhale, especially when our family footprint stomps on an increasingly fragile ecosystem.

For every action in the cottage there is a consequence, rarely any lessons learned. The outdoor shower is just beyond the bathroom and kitchen; even the six year-old knows to scream, "Don't flush! I'm in the shower." The septic tank is beneath the garden just outside the living room. The compost is around the corner from the shed. Just yesterday I simultaneously flung melon rinds while waving at a friend. The trash truck is not a temporary rumble it is a mad dash. Given the heat and the skunks, getting rid of the trash has an urgency that punctuates our day to day. And is there ever one minute when everyone in the household is asleep? We live out loud night and day.

The cats further blur the line between the inside and outside by toting in birds, one of which pecked my sister and then flew around the bedroom while she screamed and tried to restrain the cat. The fruit flies rise when you reach for fruit or vegetables, most of which we've gathered at the local farm. Nothing vanishes here except for leftovers like frosting or chocolate sauce. The cucumber peel will reappear in a slimier form. Sand from the beach will visit again and again, on the kitchen floor, between the sheets. We are constantly aware of the precariousness of the Internet connection, the flush of the toilet, the finite amount of gas in the tanks and the pilot in the stove. Newspapers, aluminum, plastic, glass and yard clippings amass until someone drives them out to the local dump.

The Seattle homecoming often feels like a return to amenities on par with the first indoor plumbing. It's the best of both worlds - the sense of living in a small town but with access to large municipal services. What bliss to simply put out all of the trash, yard waste and recycling containers to be emptied. Electricity, natural gas, cable, telephone connections flow to our homes and we receive bills for the usage of water, coming and going. But here nothing is certain except that if the skunks don't go through our garbage my mother will.

Like clockwork (not that any of our clocks work) my mother went to the dump yesterday with bagged newspapers, empty cans and what she thought was a trash bag of yard waste. The moment after she emptied it onto brush she saw our last five days of garbage at her feet. Items that should have been recycled but had been scraped into the waste along with the last bite of hamburger, corn cobs, toilet paper that was meant to spare the septic line had inadvertently been added to grass clippings and brambles. The woman who is the least likely to generate trash herself, a 73 year-old who recycled before most Americans learned the word picked up after her children yet again. A woman who still lives with guilt over one diaper rinsed in a lake and has never ever littered bent again and again to gather our personal trash.

As the months pass I will find myself longing for almost every aspect of our cottage life, the sheer joy of showering outside at sunset, even the prick of the rosebushes on wood slats as I reached for shampoo. I'll think of afternoon shadows in the sand and human footprints less distinct than those of the shorebirds, for now all I can envision is my mother picking up that trash piece by piece.

Peggy Sturdivant writes a series on neighborhoods for CrossCut.com and also writes additional pieces for the Seattle PI's Neighborhood Webtown: http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/ballard/ Her e-mail is atlargeinballard@yahoo.com