Jane Paznik-Bondarin on the beach

If only you knew two days before, a day before, you could do something different. Be smarter. Prepare.

I was a month into a six-week vacation out of town when someone who was not invited and did not have a key entered my apartment and left my jewelry box gaping, empty on my bed. My boyfriend discovered it when he went to pick up some odds and ends before he joined me by the sea. “The door was open,” he said when he called. He thought the cleaning lady was there, and went in shouting a greeting so as not to scare her as he’s done before. The refrigerator door was open too, a signal, the police say, that the robber may have been a junkie looking for orange juice. I won’t know until I return what else, besides my jewelry, is missing. What I do know is that I lost more than the intruder gained.

Something I do know is gone: a thirty-inch double strand of cultured pearls. I’ve never worn them and wasn’t likely to. But every time I opened the drawer in which they sat, I saw my mom, beaming, the day my father gave them to her. And I see him looking proud of himself for having been able to afford this gift instead of the checks he wrote and gave her along with a note that read, “All my love, Sam. Please don’t cash.”

My fifteen silver bangles are gone too. I can replace these, but I won’t. They were artifacts of being twenty in the sixties, dressed in flowing, colorful skirts and blouses, bracelets tinkling as I ran my fingers through waist-length hair. I have not been that girl for many, many years, and the world in which she lived is gone.

And my ring. This is the third time in my life that my home has been violated and my possessions stolen. The first time, I was eighteen, still living with my parents and grandparents, who slept through someone cutting a window and looting the house. The second time cost me my wedding ring, which my husband replaced with a thin gold band with five tiny diamond chips spaced around it. After he died it had become my talisman when I went for mammograms or CT-scans, gave a speech, did anything scary. Now that’s gone, too.

I am not alone. Everyone to whom I have told this story has one to tell in return. “I don’t wear much jewelry, but this was family stuff. I have nothing now to give to my daughter,” said one woman. Me too. “Thirty years ago I lost my wedding jewelry I’d collected,” a friend from London wrote. Me, too. “I chased the guy out with a broom,” a guy said of a potential burglar a decade ago. I wish I could have done that.

The experience seems almost universal.

What’s wrong with us? How have we become a thieving society that has not improved itself in the lifetime of a boomer? I remember my grandmother and mother talking about living amid an extended family, cousins and friends banging in and out of unlocked screen doors. Integrity, even if you were poor, trumped greed. Commandments were orders, not wishes. By the time I was a teenager, there were two locks on the door. Now I have three.

I didn’t hide the jewelry box. I was preparing my apartment for the building’s superintendent to paint. I was preoccupied with taking the cats and all their paraphernalia, fitting it all into the car. Packing. My mind was on paint chips and instructions to the cleaning lady. I looked at the box and I took a few pairs of earrings from it. But I didn’t move it, hide it, secure it. A friend says I can’t blame myself for not living a guarded life. I say I was imprudent at best, dumb at worst.

Someone violated what for me is sacred space, and stole the artifacts of my memories. But he can’t have the memories themselves. Not of the life I’ve led nor the people I’ve loved. He will have less pleasure from those artifacts than I did. But he has them, and I don’t.

I am angry. Angry at him, angry at myself for giving him the opportunity. And angry that everyone doesn’t share the same moral universe.

The house stood at the top of the T as we drove into Rocky Harbor from Norris Point. A typical Newfoundland house — painted frame, two stories — but with new touches: wide, long windows on the bay side that we could see when we drove onto a gravel path alongside the house, and a Jacuzzi, abutting the house next door but seemingly inaccessible to it. Didn’t make sense.

“Paid the owner to build so close,” Andrew said. “It’s Newfoundland, it’s family, or they share the Jacuzzi.”

I didn’t know which, and it bothered me. One of those silly things you just want to know which assumes more importance than it deserves because you don’t know. Each day as we drove from our commodious B&B, Sugar Hill Inn, into Rocky Harbor on our way to see the fjords in Gros Morne National Park, to catch the ferry to Woody Point, or to buy cookies or eat dinner at Java Jack‘s, I looked at the house.

One morning, there was no car in the driveway. “Stop the car, ” I said. “There’s no one home. I’ll go see if the Jacuzzi opens to the second house.” He thought I was nuts. As I was walking up the driveway, an elderly lady stepped out of the house. To cover my embarrassment at having been caught snooping, I smiled and said, “I’m so sorry. I don’t mean to invade your privacy, but I like this house so much, I wanted to see it closer than I can from the road.”

“It’s my son’s,” she said brightly. “Would you like to see it?” And before I could respond, she’d reached back into her open doorway and grabbed a set of keys from a wall hook. I motioned to Andrew to join me, and we toured the house, our hostess supplying commentary on the building of the house, herself, and her family.

Her name is Mrs. Paine. I don’t know how old she is; not young. Her three grown sons have moved to Nova Scotia. She’s a widow, lonely. She’s a native Newfoundlander, but not of the west part of the province, to which she moved more than fifty years ago to marry Mr. Paine, whose “people” come from here and meet each year for a reunion. She has no people here. We stayed as long as seemed polite, thanked her profusely, and took our leave. “When you come back to Newfoundland,” she said in an almost impenetrable accent I’ve come to associate with older Newfoundlanders, “come to visit me.” I said I would.

This is Newfoundland. As much as the gaily-hued houses in St. John’s, icebergs and puffins in a bay called Witless, outport towns with houses perched on rock, and red and white lighthouses dotting the coves, this is Newfoundland: the friendliest people on the planet. We read it in guidebooks. We experience it in the welcoming but never obsequious treatment in hotels and restaurants, in the greetings of people who pass us on the street, who look up from their gardening or laundry to say “welcome,” or who take time to tour us through their art studios even though it is clear we are visiting, not purchasing. The city of Gander is where residents turned out to take travelers stranded on 9/11 into their homes. I know people who landed there that day; they will never forget the hospitality and caring. In Newfoundland, it seems to be an everyday thing, which explains a lot about my friend Eileen, whose “people” hail from there.

Guides to Newfoundland divide the island — called “The Rock” by Canadians — into four regions: the Avalon Peninsula, Eastern, Central, and Western regions. We started out thinking that next time we’d fly into Deer Lake instead of St. John’s and spend our time only in the west, but in each region we visited, we discovered we’d only seen … well, the tip of the iceberg.

For icebergs, go to Trinity in late June, where a berg is as likely to sit outside your kitchen window as it is to break up into bergy bits before your eyes. In fact, go to Trinity for any reason. It is a handsome, sweet town that will steal your heart. It was the location for the Canadian film Random Passage — the film set is a tourist attraction — and The Shipping News (although Annie Proulx set the book in L’Anse Aux Meadows, in the far north west of the island). Make sure to stay at Artisan Inn or one of the other properties owned or managed by Tinika Gow, who will direct you on scenic walks, and dine at her delightful restaurant and gallery. Explore the greenery of Terra Nova National Park. As you’re heading east, stop in Harbour Grace to see the airport from which Amelia Earhart began her ultimately ill-fated transatlantic crossing.

If you spend a few days in St. John’s, consider the charming Bluestone Inn, where Neil will suggest just the right places to dine, including the inventive Restaurant 21, just down the block. Visit The Rooms, a well-designed art gallery, museum, and archives, all dedicated to the history of Newfoundland and Labrador. Walk along Duckworth and Water Streets and explore the new galleries, among them St. Michael’s Printshop or The Leyton Gallery. You may have to drive back west to Port au Choix to see Ben Ploughman’s folk art, but it’s worth the drive.

People have left The Rock. It’s not an easy life. They leave because of cold winters that last into a short summer, rain, the need to re-invent themselves because of the death of the fishing industry. But people are returning, too. A fierce love of place pervades a substantial literature, and everyone you meet. “Do you like our island?” everyone asks, “and will you return?” Yes, and yes.