Strangers by Belle Burden

I told myself to be graceful, told myself not to say too much.  I put on my summer dresses. I went to cocktail parties. I did 'tide rides' in the Vineyard Sound and group walks in Chilmark.  I bought hostess gifts.  I smiled at my dinner partners.  I made small talk on the pier about the weather, about the kids, as I stood there, in my bathing suit, alone among the married couples, wanting to die.

In June 2023 Belle Burden publishes an essay in Modern Love the long- standing New York Times column about relationships. It's the story of how her husband of twenty years leaves her for a younger woman and inexplicably wants minimal contact with their three children.  After publication she goes out onto the lawn of her home at Martha's vineyard and sees a huge swarm of dragonflies.  Fearing this is an ominous sign she Googles dragonflies and discovers that they represent self-actualisation.

This elegantly written memoir evolved from the essay.  She is utterly blind-sided by her husband's affair and his cold mocking of her: "Boo-hoo. Poor Belle. Always the victim."  Of course this is only one side of the story but a depressingly familiar one.  Most friends and family rally to support her. Some don't.  

And I felt a deep sense of embarrassment about it, James was the one who walked out but the shame had become mine.  I had made it mine.  I was an abandoned wife, a woman rejected by her husband, a woman who had failed to keep her family together.  I would be the outsider among all the married people, all the intact families, all the women who were wanted by their husbands.

So how does Belle rebuild her life?  She does, of course, come from a privileged background  descended from the Vanderbilts and her grandmother, Grace Paley was one of Truman Capote's coterie of glamorous 'Swans.'  But money does not keep pain and humiliation from our lives.  She finds that walking through it helps.  Eight miles every day through sun, rain and hail until her boots are dusted white with saltwater. She searches for sea glass in the wet sand, meticulously collecting only the completely smooth coloured glass and keeping it in a jar by the door.

She even finds herself enjoying having lots of her daughters' friends over who eat snacks, watch TV, swim in the pool and play loud music. 

I was always wary of a crowd, of things getting out of control, of messes. But in my new state, I loved it, It made me feel good, all that happiness and noise and chaos.

This beautifully written memoir begins and ends with ospreys returning to the same nest on Martha's Vineyard. The ospreys nesting, migration and return recur throughout the memoir.  However I think it is the dragonflies - symbolic of lightness and resilience - who really represent this story.