Sag harbor is a black enclave on Long Island. Sandra E. Garcia writes about it in the NYTimes. The whole piece is worthwhile, but I was struck by the second of the following two paragraphs (the first paragraph is for context:
Richard and Dorothy Granger, both dentists in Glen Cove, Long Island, came to Sag Harbor Hills in the early 1950s. Their daughter, Beverly Granger, 70, a retired dentist and ceramist who was born a year before her parents built their home, now lives in a renovated 2,500-square-foot, two-story house on the original plot of land with her 73-year-old husband, Aloysius Cuyjet, a retired physician who grew up in Sag Harbor. Granger renovated the home in 2003, after her mother died, puncturing the exterior with square windows and adding sliding glass doors that provide views of Sag Harbor Bay beyond her own private beach. Back in 1951, when the home was completed, it was modest, with sketchy wiring and inadequate heating. Back then, she remembers being able to skip across the properties and through the woods to meet her friends.
She also recalls a time when there was no way to tell where one house ended and another began. All the children in the subdivisions belonged to every adult that lived there. If a child scraped her knee in front of the Grangers’ house, she could walk in scuffed and walk out with a bandaged wound. If one mother cooked, all the kids nearby ate. If one mother was on the beach, all the children were looked after. “I felt loved there in a way that, now having lived in many other communities, I realize was unusual and incredibly empowering,” says Brooke Williams, 54, who grew up spending summers just outside Azurest and now owns her own small house in Sag Harbor, where she spends summers with her husband, Josh Liberson, 49, and their daughter, Ada. “Our pride of place — of the various achievements of our friends and family — and our cohesion and generosity toward each other came from a profound sense of love,” she says.
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