Great Cranberry Island is a tiny, crescent-shaped chunk of Maine, in a bay shadowed by Acadia National Park’s mountains. It’s only two square miles, so after I’d visited every year for three decades, I thought I’d seen every tidepool, dirt road and granite cliff that the island had to offer.

That illusion was shattered a couple years ago when an old-timer took me on a walk. We went to a familiar spot, but I was in for a big surprise. What I’d always seen as a nondescript field turned out to be a big patch of milkweed. At that moment in late July, it had come to life with hundreds of monarch butterflies for whom milkweed is essential to reproduction. Across the sunlit field, monarchs were dancing, mating and laying eggs, making the milkweed shimmer with color, movement and energy. I’d never seen anything like it.

That experience of discovery along a well-trod path reminded me: No matter how many times you return to a place, there is always more to be revealed. Returning to the same place over and over brings the rewards of seeing familiar things from new perspectives, observing how places change with the seasons, and witnessing how ecosystems change over time.

No place on the planet has given me more of those rewards than Great Cranberry Island. The Washington, D.C., area has been my family’s home for decades, but we began making summer visits to Great Cranberry in the 1990s. We bought a house there in 2007; “worked from home” there for long stretches during the COVID shutdown; and started living there for months at a time after my husband and I retired. It’s been a particularly important refuge in these times of political chaos in Washington.

The butterfly discovery was just one of many moments of clarity as I returned again and again to the island, getting fresh insights — panoramic, micro and macro — into this beloved place.

The panoramic perspective came a few years ago when my son and I circumnavigated the island in our tandem kayak. We got a vivid rolling portrait of the island’s shore, every face having a radically different character. The back shore, facing the open sea, is studded with black basalt cliffs and huge pink granite boulders. The east side is defined by a big, shallow inlet where oysters are farmed. The north shore is dotted with homes facing a spectacular view of Acadia’s mountains. Turning down the Western Way, the homestretch usually involves paddling into headwinds until we catch sight of Great Head, the distinctive rock outcropping that signals our arrival home.

My own backyard gave me a micro perspective on the island’s ecology. One spring, I marked off with twine a square yard of our meadow and set out to learn everything I could about its contents. I began the study just as the wildflowers were starting to blossom, including yellow and orange hawkweed and vivid purple vetch. I identified mosses and visiting insects. I learned to tell the difference between bracken and ferns, grasses and sedge. That minute study enriched my view of the entire island. Having identified plants in that small patch, I suddenly saw them everywhere.

The big-picture perspective came to me full force a few years ago, when I set out to climb all 26 of the peaks of Acadia National Park. It was a completion-complex kind of goal, not a grueling physical challenge because none of the peaks are more than 1,530 feet. But there were many I’d not climbed because I was always drawn to the splashiest peaks like Cadillac, Penobscot and the Bee Hive.

As I took in the less-traveled hills, I gleaned more than a check-the-box sense of accomplishment. I got a more nuanced understanding of the geology of Mount Desert Island. Once you realize that most of the mountains are steep on their east and west sides, with more gentle slopes on the north and south ridges, you can appreciate the power of glaciers cutting through the region during the Ice Age.

Every Acadia peak offers similar views of the surrounding waters and islands. But it never gets old, looking back on Great Cranberry Island, peering through binoculars to see the ferry pulling up to the town dock from a distance. It’s a view that almost makes me homesick, even though I’ll be back in a couple hours, to that place that I no longer think of as a place I visit or go on vacation. Now it’s just the other place I live.