maine attraction; From Gibson-girl ghosts to Grandmother's wallpaper, the family place by the sea is truly special, writes Marina Rust.

The gutters need replacing, the wallpaper is peeling, and how many are coming for dinner tonight? How is this an "escape"?

My great-great-grandmother Mrs. George Bird loved American history and modeled the house after Mount Vernon. Bird Cottage, as it is known, is perhaps not so much an escape as a return; I feel less its owner than its curator. The former female owners each watch from a different wall of the living room, their portraits in chronological order: Mrs. Bird from the 1890s; her daughter as a Gibson girl; Granny in thirties chic; my aunt, haute '71.

My husband calls the island a matriarchy. It has known its share of strong women, many of whom still make their presences felt. Traditionally, with summer places, women and children are the ones spending the season, husbands appearing on weekends. It would have been brutish to expect a bride to convert to a man's summer place when she had one of her own. We're preserving family history, I told myself when I took on the gutters. It's for the girls. They are sixth generation.

My own early-childhood memories were farther up island, where my mother and I would visit Granny in the house she and Grandfather bought as newlyweds. I'd climb the rocks along the dock, arranging marine life in tide pools. I didn't know there were other children on the island; I realize now my mother was avoiding their parents.

In the seventies, summer houses like this were considered white elephants. Families were fragmented, the houses weren't winterized, and to spend all that money to repaint and maintain those salt-worn facades would have been unseemly. After Granny's mother died in the fifties, Bird Cottage sat empty. Whether Granny held on to it out of optimism for the future or attachment to the past, I do not know; perhaps both.

Generations ebb and flow, and in 1976 the house got a family. My aunt moved back from Europe with her three children. At eleven, I remember a long climb with my mother down the rocky beaches to Bird Cottage, where her sister was supervising the digging of a very un-Maine-like heated swimming pool. After that summer, I stayed at my aunt's. My cousins became like my brother and sisters; that is what a family house does.

Peaceful as the setting looks, it was not always so. In the eighties, my cousin threw a great party with a rockabilly band and huge speakers in the front hall. There were smaller blowouts, too, spontaneous late-night dance parties featuring the Dirty Dancing sound track and Madonna's first album, the latter of which was played so often that a friend eventually stole it, had it framed, and presented it back with a plaque reading 1983-1996, rip. In 1999, my cousin threw a more formal hundredth-birthday party for the house, complete with an attached tent for dancing and a big band. The invitation read black tie, no black dresses. The dance floor did double duty; three weeks later my husband and I used it for our wedding. "If Ian is married here, he'll always feel a part of it," said my cousin, who'd tired of repairs. We bought the house soon after, and expect the next generation's dance parties in a decade or so.