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Katherine Garrison: North toward home

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO Katherine Garrison at home on Shelter Island.
CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO
Katherine Garrison at home on Shelter Island.

Katherine Garrison considers herself a southerner, even though many of the most important milestones of her life have taken place far north of the Mason-Dixon line.

This mother of five has seen all of her kids either already graduated from the Shelter Island School, or will be in short order. She’s been on the school board and now works at the Shelter Island Library.

But Katherine was born in Dothan, Alabama, about 12 miles from the Florida line, was raised and schooled in the South, and lived there happily until she moved to Shelter Island 11 years ago with her husband, Alan, and their children.

The move wasn’t her idea. In fact, her initial response to Alan’s suggestion that they uproot their young family and relocate to an island between the North and South forks of Long Island, accessible by boat for only 18 out of 24 hours a day, was, “You are freaking ridiculous. We are not moving.”

But Alan was disenchanted with his job and a friend from college, Terry Harwood, owner of Vine Street Café, told him what a great place the Island is to raise a family.

Around this time, Alan related a strange dream to Katherine, a dream in which he was an assistant tetherball coach. For years he had been working for Northwestern Mutual, an insurance company, and it was starting to get old. He wondered if the dream meant anything. ”Who even has an assistant tetherball coach?” Katherine said. “It means you think you are a big, old loser.”

“He made the decision,” Katherine added. “He knew. He saw the big picture.”

In the end, Katherine stayed behind with the kids for a few months before joining Alan, who went ahead to make sure it was right.

Alan worked at Vine Street for a couple of years before becoming the manager of the Shelter Island Yacht Club, where he’s worked for the last nine years.

Katherine’s own family situation was unusual for a child of the 1970s growing up in the Deep South.

She was an only child of divorced parents. “Nobody else’s parents were divorced,” she said, “so it was really awkward and weird.”

Katherine lost touch with her father for years, only reconnecting when she became a mother. Since then he has been a part of her life.

Her confusing childhood has informed her own style of motherhood. “I wanted to be the kind of mother, my mother couldn’t be,” she said. “I really wanted that for my children.”

After starting at Huntingdon College, (Harper Lee is an alumna) and briefly attending Birmingham–Southern College, Katherine graduated from the University of Tennessee. In her final year, she took a required English class that was, in retrospect, a life-changer.

The students were asked to write a paper describing their aspirations for the future, but when it came time for Katherine to discuss it with the professor, he told her that her plan to be a flight attendant and live in France was ridiculous. After hysterics and a phone call by the teacher to Katherine’s mother, she decided he was right.

“Dreams are wonderful, but they must be tempered with a dose of reality,” she said. “If you want something you have to be very committed.”

It was in the same English class that Katherine met Alan, and they married in June of 1989.

She came to realize that a career and graduate school were not for her. “I just wanted to be a mother,” she said. “So I was very lucky that my husband encouraged me to want to be a mom.”

Their first child, Kirby, graduated from Stony Brook University and recently started his own business, a craft brewery in Dayton, Tennessee. Drew and Olivia were both valedictorians at Shelter Island High School and are now in college; Drew is a sophomore at the University of Buffalo, and Olivia a freshman at Iowa State University. Will is a junior and Lily is a freshman at Shelter Island High School.

When Kirby was born, Katherine had no idea what to expect, “I had no siblings” she said, “and I didn’t babysit.” She described the experience with wonder. “We went to Lamaze, we giggled, we laughed.

And then I was in labor, and Alan got home and we were speeding through the streets of Chattanooga. I was 21-years-old-crazy”

For Katherine, part of being the best-possible mother was home-schooling. For the 14 years before the family moved to Shelter Island she was head teacher of her own school, with a five-to-one student/teacher ratio. “I didn’t want them to come home and have me ask, ‘What did you do today?’” she said.

Kirby went to school in Chattanooga through second grade before she decided to make the change. “I was clearing out his desk and the teacher said to me, ‘You are making a big mistake,’” she said. “That was her opinion, but I wanted to be part of his education.”

The kitchen of the Garrison home became a schoolroom, with a bench in the corner stuffed with textbooks and other materials. Katherine found that her own education deepened as she learned more about the subjects she was teaching to her children. She came to appreciate the different learning styles of each of her children through the teaching experience. “I could not have learned that if I hadn’t been in that situation,” she said. “I had no clue.”

Concerned that it would send the wrong message in their new community when the family moved to Shelter Island, Alan told Katherine the time had come to stop home-schooling, which made the transition that much harder for her.

“It was just like being dropped on another planet,” she said. “We were not just moving from the South and from our family, but we were putting the children in school. Everything known and comfortable had been shaken and dumped out.”

In the years since the family was uprooted, Katherine has seen her children put down new, strong roots and thrive, embracing school sports, the school’s drama program and achieving academically. Kirby’s interest in pursuing a culinary business is a direct result of the expansion of his palate and interest in new foods and tastes from the move North over a decade ago.

“Shelter Island is like a tapestry,” Katherine said. “Where we came from there wasn’t much diversity.

Here there is a lot of diversity. It’s a remarkable, special place.”

With Kirby, Drew and Olivia launched into the world and Will and Lily in high school, Katherine sees that she’s running out of children. However, she has acquired three Cavalier King Charles Spaniels, Ty, BeeDoodles and Pippa.

“I told my husband for every child we lose I need another dog,” she said.

“It’s a blessing every day,” Katherine noted. “I have five healthy children and an embarrassment of riches.”

She’s proud of her grown-up children making their way in the world, adjusting to new lives outside Shelter Island. Of all her kids, she said, Kirby still remembers the most about being Southern.

“I don’t want them to lose that piece of themselves.”