In my home, on a white shelf in the living room is a framed page of the Vineyard Gazette from 1989 announcing this old house’s 300th birthday. The notice describes the Island history of the building, pulled from scholars’ notes and public records, and has served as a source of pride and honor for my family for 23 years.

Recently, a friend of mine came to the Island to visit me.

“I love old houses like this,” he said, eyeing the exposed beams. “It feels like we’re in a whaler.”

“I’m so glad to hear you say that,” I said, and I showed him to his room.

In the upstairs bedroom, in the wall behind the headboard, the sound of mice scurrying is so loud and close that it feels like hosting a thousand tiny bedfellows.

I have spent part of every summer staying in this house, and my memories of it share a theme. One beautiful, sunny day in July, our rusted septic tank exploded, backing up in every fixture and faucet in the house. I was nine years old, and my picture-book memories of that summer are nightmarish. We banded together, all of us, to clean and fix. After the initial harrowing shock, the mood lightened. We got through it. The next year, the kitchen floor caved in. Even during the hottest, driest August days, every surface and crevice of this house is damp.

Last week, I volunteered to repaint the walls of the dining room. The paint was old and chipping a bit but the job seemed straightforward enough. After I stripped away the first layer, I stepped back to survey the damage. Those graceful cracks gave way to gaping holes and crumbling cement, like seeing your favorite television news anchor in HD for the first time. The wood boards supporting the cement panels were soft and moldy and the small, newly exposed holes breathed a rotting wind into the dining room. It felt like I had opened a sarcophagus.

When I was young, a neighboring family built a modern mansion on Chilmark Pond. There was immediate backlash from the surrounding community. The house constructed was extremely large, and decidedly not in the vein of the Island’s classic aesthetic. In the opinions of our neighbors, the development represented an assault on the Island’s cultural values, and the harbinger of the end of decency. What I remember most, though, is that instead of grumbling like the rest, my family was gulping covetously at the site of it. I imagined us huddled together outside their windows like Dickensian orphans, begging for a scrap of cable television or a clean shower.

On the second floor of this old house, inexplicably, there are closet doors with no closets inside. The doors, one in each room, are painted white to look like the rest, but open instead into the dark eaves of the house. These areas are out of bounds, like a soundstage, as though our upstairs lives were a Hollywood movie. In these areas live the dust, the mice and the ghosts. I would describe the root cellar, only I can’t remember what it’s like down there. The last time I opened the exterior double-doors to that terrifying abyss, I was a child, and unaware of my own mortality. All old houses settle and creak, but this old house makes a moaning death rattle that jars me awake at night.

After years of constant renovation, for the first time in my life, she is getting close to sustainability. The kitchen has a new foundation and the bathrooms boast sparkling new fixtures. The well water is obedient and clean. In truth, she is a beautiful house. The living room has a view of the Atlantic Ocean, and the exposed beams and low ceilings do make it feel like the hull of a ship. The stairs to the bedrooms are narrow and old and buried deep in the center of a large chimney sits an antique domed bread oven that I only recently discovered. The green, overgrown property surrounding is penned in by mossy stone walls. Past a sprawling field is a rutted dirt road leading to Chilmark Pond. The view from the boat dock is sublime, and on the prettiest, clearest summer nights, across the water, you can almost see the glow of plasma screens on the faces of that warm, clean family and their beautiful, modern home.

Gazette contributor Tim Stanley lives in Chilmark.