First Person: Rhode Island Redux

Fall 2025, visiting the troll Mrs. Skipper off the beloved East Bay Bike Path in East Providence. Photography courtesy of Lisa A. Watts

It’s a classic Rhode Island story: I have returned, as a freshly minted retiree, to the tiny state where I first lived as a fresh-faced college graduate. The state has a magnetic force that tends to hold onto its people, right? It just took me a while to get back here.

Bob and Lisa marrying outside of Boston in June 1987. Photography courtesy of Lisa A. Watts

We often can’t see the patterns of our life while we’re living them. Only in retrospect can I recognize the itch I’ve been looking to scratch for decades. Over forty years of building careers and raising kids, my husband, Bob, and I have lived in five states and seven communities (and fifteen houses, but that’s a whole other story). We didn’t plan to live an unsettled life. We moved mostly for job opportunities. For better or worse, I tend to face forward, moving full speed ahead to the next thing. However faintly in the background, my pull to Rhode Island was almost always there.

I was twenty-two when the U.S. Yacht Racing Union in Newport hired me as a communications assistant. I left UMass Amherst’s apple orchards for the Ocean State’s beaches. I had a stunning view of Newport Harbor and downtown from my cubicle above the Goat Island Marina. I attended galas in the mansions and on Monday nights drove to Providence for a graphic design class at the Rhode Island School of Design. On weekends, I biked with a few workmates around much of the state, from Portsmouth to Little Compton and loops through rural South County.

But professionally and socially, I wanted more, so at twenty-four I moved to Boston. I landed a job editing Northeastern University’s alumni magazine. On my first day of work I met Dee, a marketing professor who became an instant running and biking pal. A crush I developed on Bob, the guy in an office down the hall, soon bloomed into a relationship and a wedding.

In 1994, visiting Watch Hill Harbor on vacation from their home in Mystic, Connecticut. Photography courtesy of Lisa A. Watts

I was still a newlywed when a job posting caught my eye: associate editor for the soon-to-launch Rhode Island Monthly (yes, this magazine, now approaching its fortieth birthday!). The new magazine sounded closer to the cultural journalism I’d studied and loved at UMass. Bob understood my ambition. He stayed behind in a good job with Harvard while I rented a duplex off Hope Street on Providence’s East Side. I rolled my bike downhill to the magazine’s Branch Avenue offices above Benny’s. On Fridays, I collected Bob at the train station to spend our weekends exploring Rhode Island.

Long-distance marriage wasn’t a great way to live, though. After about a year, I returned to Boston. I was focused mostly on a new goal, achieved a year or so later when our daughter was born, followed less than two years later by our son.

Over the years, led by Bob’s work, we moved farther and farther away: first to Mystic, Connecticut, then Ohio, and then North Carolina. But once a year, we touched down for a week or two at the beach in Misquamicut. We started the tradition when we lived in Mystic with a toddler and baby. After moving to landlocked Ohio, we drove east each summer so our kids could jump in ocean waves and dine on fried clams for dinner and ice cream for dessert. Eventually we bought our own little place in Misquamicut’s Cove Road neighborhood and rented it out for most of the season.

Lisa outside the Congdon Avenue rental she shared in Newport, 1983, during her first job out of college. Photography courtesy of Lisa A. Watts

By 2012, we’d been living in Greensboro, North Carolina, for six years. We were empty nesters and we’d become Southerners, it seemed. We sold our Misquamicut house thinking we’d find a getaway closer to home. Soon, a little place on North Carolina’s coast stole my heart. The house was unassuming, but it looked out over a gorgeous, wide expanse of the Neuse River as it heads to Pamlico Sound and the ocean. I kayaked on the river and logged hundreds of hours on a daybed on the back porch, two dogs curled at my feet, watching the wind dance over the water. Eventually, I thought, we would split our retirement years between the river house and our townhouse in Durham, a college town three hours west.

The COVID-19 pandemic shook up those plans as it wreaked havoc across the globe. In March 2020, when our jobs sent us home, we tried living at the river house. Bob, a city guy, finally confessed to feeling confined and uneasy in such a remote and deeply conservative area. I regrouped and cooked up a new plan: Westerly, Rhode Island. We could live within walking distance of the little downtown but also close to the Pawcatuck River to launch my kayak. We could enjoy our old haunts around Misquamicut. Our grown kids would be a three-hour train ride south in New York City; dear friends were an hour’s train ride north in Boston.

Lisa on the front porch of the newly purchased Misquamicut beach house, 2000. Photography courtesy of Lisa A. Watts

It was a brilliant plan, mostly, except for the timing. After weathering our first winter back north, during lockdowns that kept us from socializing much, Bob received a scary health diagnosis while adjusting to his first year of retirement. Charming as it is, Westerly sits a bit removed from the rest of the state. That isolation while being new in town was the last thing we needed. So just before our second winter, we pulled up stakes and headed back south to Greensboro. Bob’s lymphoma was treated successfully; I made new running pals while we embraced friends from living there a decade earlier. As I framed our boomerang story, we chose community over coastline.

Walking at Weekapaug Beach in the fall of 2020. Photography courtesy of Lisa A. Watts

Bob on the front porch of their downtown Westerly house, 2020. Photography courtesy of Lisa A. Watts

Except I really missed being near water, especially in the muggy heat of North Carolina summers. After a year back south, I talked Bob into the idea of having a small place in Rhode Island where we could spend summers, then rent it out for the school year while we returned to Greensboro. In 2022, I found a cozy Cape in the heart of Barrington on a tiny street that dead ends at the East Bay Bike Path and Brickyard Pond. Providence is an eight-mile bike ride or twenty-minute drive away for Bob to get his city fix.

We loved our first summer back north. Camp Barrington, we dubbed it. Our days were full of biking, paddling, running, yoga, ferry rides and more with friends new and old — including Dee, the friend I met decades ago in Boston. That fall, back in North Carolina with our Barrington house rented out, Bob surprised me by lobbying to move to Rhode Island permanently. He couldn’t explain exactly why, but the place suited him. He wanted to sink roots, not merely drop in for a few months.

So here we are, Rhode Islanders once again. We’re pledging this is it — we’re done with moving. It’s a full circle that I didn’t see coming, yet it all makes sense. Rhode Island is sweetly familiar at a gut level: the accents, the breeze off Narragansett Bay, turtleneck sweaters, the lack of pretension. I feel a sense of comfort and belonging I didn’t even know I was missing.

Four decades ago, my Newport job sent me to Indianapolis in the middle of the summer. I remember landing back at T.F. Green and how good the cool salt air felt after a few days in the steamy Midwest. It smelled like home. It still does.

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Lisa A. Watts is a writer and editor living in Barrington with her husband, Bob Malekoff. She details her journey as a serial homebuyer in a new memoir, Curb Appeal: Forty Years of Falling for Houses and Finding Home.

Photography courtesy of Lisa A. Watts