Back Home: Cockle Cove Meadows in Chatham, Massachusettsis more than a place, it's a solace to Kathryn Holmquistand a grandmother to her children. Almost every year she relives thesummers of her childhood

The birds are the ones that really own this place. As I sit in my nightdress on the deck writing beneath the pines, a cardinal bristles its red crest and lands inches from my laptop to investigate. It is 6 a.m., and I am in heaven. Cockle Cove Meadows, Chatham, Massachusetts. My home. This is where I want to be.

The sky is the kind of innocent, promising blue that makes you want to cry if you live in Dublin. A morning dove is crooning five jazz notes, minor key, ignoring the dissonant contrapuntal chorus of robins and sparrows. A woodpecker plays percussion. Rabbits, squirrels and chipmunks come looking for their breakfast.

Today will be hot again. The sand will burn our feet. And I will spend the day halfway between laughter and tears, knowing that this is all too good to be true. Summer never lasts. In my case, it lasts three or four weeks in the time I can afford to take away from work in Dublin.

This is my mother's house. She died here. This is where I nursed her and mourned her. The house is so infused with her that I cannot help but think that this house is my mother. An old friend once described it as a tomb, but I don't think so. We have brought our own children here and their laughter has cleansed the place of morbid memories. Because we know, that while my mother may have died here, what she really did was live here. And she is still alive in the sounds of birds, in the smells of bay, geranium and rosehip.

Yet the children have to know that up the road a way, their grandmother is buried by the seaside. They plant flowers for her, and dance disrespectfully (I'm glad to say) around the red roses adorning her grave. Roses that bloom with determination, despite the neglect of children that live in New York, Washington, Dublin.

All of this makes Cockle Cove more than a place. Cockle Cove is grandmother to my children and solace to me. Nearly half-a-century in my family, this house is (I sometimes think) the only solid thing I have to rely on.

Somehow I think that our friend Alex knows this as she greets us on our first jet-lagged morning with a plate of freshly-baked blueberry muffins, hot out of the oven by 8 a.m. Alex is more than just official meeter and greeter in our little compound of cottages.

Later in the day, Alex and her husband, Jack, who restores antique sloops for a museum at Newport in his spare time, have another gift for us. Jack has built a tiny white skiff from a single plank of plywood. The boat is to be named "Finn", my six-year-old son's name.

Hilary, Alex and Jack's daughter, has chosen the name. She's been studying at Oxford the past few years, but still comes back - just like I do. You can't help but come back. You can travel the world, but nothing else is ever good enough. Not Spain, or France or Portugal or Greece. Chatham gets in on you and takes you over. You will always want fried clams, not calamari.

Standing on the lawn by the boat in the yellow evening sun, Jack helps Finn to place the black letters on the stern: FINN. My son is chuffed and we take pictures that we'll all share later, over the Net.

This is what coming home means. It's people who have known you all your life. People who give you homecomings created of bear-hugs and home-made strawberry jam and make you feel that you never left. People who may, for a second, help with the illusion that you will never leave, even though you know you will have to.

As I sit at my laptop, my children are playing on the lawns between our houses. This is a place with no gates or fences. We have all been here forever - the Driscolls, Ryans, Kellys, Dunnes. All Irish names and faces except for ours: Holmquists.

As my children tumble down a grassy hill, Alex says to me: "What would your mother have thought?" It is enough, for me, to keep my mother's thoughts a mystery and simply to know that this woman beside me remembers that my mother was an insightful woman. Between us, without a word, Alex and I can quietly imagine what my mother would have thought. My rangy, wild middle daughter is just like me - that's what.

We are in the attic, my three children and I, looking for the fishing nets. There is a box: "keepsakes", it says. Translation: special objects that remind us of our mother, who died nearly a quarter of a century ago when we were in our teens. I daren't open it. "Why not?" asks my daughter. "A box is nothing to be afraid of!" Sometimes it is. Sometimes a house is like a box that you open, only to feel memories spilling out. It's best to keep it taped shut.

The years I haven't come here, have been the closed box years when I couldn't bear to feel all that I had lost. Now, with my own children, I've done with adventuring and I come home as often as I can. It's the same with the other mothers on the beach. All of us played together as children, and now our own children play together. We all share in common parents with the foresight to have given their grandchildren and great-grandchildren Cockle Cove summers in perpetuity. Not that it's so cut and dried.

Sometimes we feel like we're hanging on for dear life. We're adults, not children. This place brings out the children in us, but doesn't erase real life altogether.

Beside the house, our boat is up on blocks.

I can remember sailing with my parents, sunning myself on the deck as my brothers dipped their fishing rods into the water, trying to catch flounder. The boat has been there forever, unused. It's so much work to get it into the water. None of us has the time. My brothers and I come and go for a few weeks, revisit memories, then leave again. Life has changed from the days when we were children and mothers spent the summer in Chatham, while their husbands came and went on tiny planes as fragile as toys at Chatham airport.

Everything changes here. When I was a child, the first thing my mother would do was take us to the beach to see how it had been remoulded by winter storms. Year after year, the beach was never the same. Just like life. Yet everything was the same.

Always, for me, there is this feeling that Chatham knows me better than I know myself. That I will one day be one of the many ghosts who cannot say goodbye. Not that I want to sentimentalise it. Chatham is a real, working town. Young people come here to build lives and families - people like Tim Wood, an award-winning journalist who edits the Cape Cod Chronicle, probably best described as a mini-Irish Times, with its liberal ethos, environmental awareness, political savvy and campaigning spirit.

Tim is among those fighting to help Chatham retain its small-town feel. He leaves a key to the small newspaper office hidden under a grey shingle by the editorial entrance, so that I can log on whenever I need to. He leaves his PC running for me and a note with his phone number just in case I have a problem.

This is what home means. People that recognise you as one of their own and make you feel "at home".

You could take an outsider's perspective and see Chatham as something like the town in Forrest Gump, a kind of Disney-on-sea where nothing changes and no one ages. Where the white clapboard houses sparkle and there is never any pain or disappointment.

Those of us who grew up here know that's not true.

We know pain. It's the bittersweet beauty of the place that makes us keep coming back. It's the memories and the family ties. We daren't feel smug about it. It's enough for us to know how lucky we are to give our children the kind of summers we once had - even if it's only for a few weeks.