In early August on a Saturday night this past hot summer, I wanted to go dancing at the Portuguese American Club. I love to dance and will put aside almost anything for the chance, as long as a good band is playing the music I’ve loved from forever; the rhythm and blues of Big Bill Broonzy and Muddy Waters, the country of Johnny Cash up through rock and roll with Fats Domino, Little Richard, and then the great epiphany, my coming of age with The Beatles.

My husband and I danced for 50 years, the first up at any wedding or bar mitzvah, finding our sweet spot on the Island when Johnny Hoy and the Bluefish were playing. If there wasn’t dancing somewhere else, we put on records and took off around the living room to Can’t Buy Me Love, Springsteen’s Buffalo Girls Won’t you Come Out Tonight, Scott Joplin’s poignant Maple Leaf Rag.

It was our high. It was pure joy.

His last dance was at Memorial Wharf. The Bluefish were playing. It was late August 2014, and he could barely stand on his own. But as people of all ages whirled about him, I, too, dancing with our then nine-year-old granddaughter, he pulled himself up with enormous effort, whispering, “I want to dance.”

And so we did, swinging together, small moves in a small space, the crowd around applauding. It was the last dance of summer, the last of our years together.

When he died two months later, I didn’t just lose him and all that he meant to me, I feared my dancing days were lost. My life, if not over, would be miserably diminished.

Then it occurred to me that in the long span of time in which he had been my only partner, women no longer waited for a man to come forward as in the stilted ballroom dancing lessons of my adolescence. Now they just took to the floors and if free spirited enough danced with abandon. I didn’t have to be trapped in some myth of “old age.” Nothing old about me except the stigma of the number and a few wrinkles that clearly were lost looking for a face on which to land.

I started to dance again.

Eventually, I discovered the P.A. Club, a place I had never been to in nearly 40 years of Island living. It’s down-home character made me think of places I’d gone to in the blue collar Connecticut town where I’d grown up and immediately felt comfortable there.

And so on a Saturday night in August, I went there to dance. I’d never heard of the band and was reluctant to go until my Island music consultant, Jeremy Berlin, texted me saying that this group with the odd name of Blue Switch was worth it.

“All blues all the time,” Jeremy said. “Go. The guy’s joy is infectious.”

Usually I am with my best dance “mate” but she was away. Other friends were summer busy. I had no visiting company and because the P.A. Club is so easy for a woman alone to be at, I had no qualms about going on my own. I wanted my fix.

When I arrived, the parking lot was empty, one white pickup truck sitting off to the side. The buildings were dark. I checked the back but no cars there either, no people on the porch, or thumping sounds of drums and bass, the plunk of a guitar, the stream of a harmonica.

I peered into the dimness. The three stalwart ladies who run the bar and manage the space were sitting alone. I turned to the managers Charlene Alley and Noel Bagnall.

“Isn’t there music here tonight?” I asked.

“Yes, the band was late.”

“Late?”

I looked around, there wasn’t a soul besides them. It was empty.

“They’re setting up now.”

“They’re setting up? But there’s no one here!”

“It’s August!” came their reply.

Now, even in darkest February, there are usually 30 people at the P.A. Club on a Saturday night. But August?

I slunk back to the porch watching through the window, curious, a little apprehensive at the starkness of a club with a band and no people on a Saturday night. Then I saw shadows of some guys with instruments moving around.

I thought, “Well, there is home or there is here.”

I went back in, strolled up to the bar and perched on a corner stool. The band, all four of them, were hovering about, tuning up. Then a couple and one middle aged man, regulars I recognized, came in, sat at the bar, immersing themselves in the four screens of the Red Sox losing at Yankee Stadium. Their presence didn’t much change the ratio of four guys playing their heart out to four hangers on, two managers and one bartender.

With no preamble, the band began to belt out one of many tunes by Little Walter, a Mississippi born and made blues player, whose music topped the R&B charts in the 1950s and 60s. It was rich, lusty and even with a near empty large room, the sound filled the space.

I sat on my stool, surveying the ludicrously empty floor around this remarkable group. I did what I do when music starts to pulse through my whole being: I began to sway in place, rocking on the small seat until I could hardly breathe. And then I just didn’t give a damn. I slid off the stool, shimmied up to the band and let go.

They gave me subtle appreciative nods. After all, I was filling the floor.

With harmonica holding at his mouth, band leader Jim Carnazza stepped down and joined me in dance, enough to make me lose any sense of self consciousness that I was dancing alone in a club on a Saturday night in August.

Jim told me later that playing harmonica is a direct link to the brain. “You can breathe music, it’s like speaking, that’s why harmonica is so effective with the blues, you can ‘speak’ the blues,” he said.

The blues spoke and as I danced with delight, I realized I was living one of my fantasies, with a minor change. Long ago I’d decided that I’d come back in the next life as a blues singer. I couldn’t carry a tune in this life, but I love to sing and figured that would right itself next time around. I’d belt out the blues in smoky clubs (without the smoke). I would be Billie Holiday (without the troubles), Sister Rosetta Tharpe with a magic guitar, moving seamlessly from gospel to rock, and if I could morph from life unto life, I’d end up as Aretha, breathing fire as a Natural Woman.

Suddenly, dancing with no inhibitions, at an age when one is put in a box (figuratively, never mind literally) as old and irrelevant, I realized that I was living my fantasy. Dancing gives as much life to the soul as does full throated song. It blew my mind. I won’t have to wait for an after-death comeback. I am, oh, so alive.

At north of seventy, with realistically fewer years left than the decades done, these moments matter. Here I was, dancing alone at the P.A. Club on a hot August Saturday night to one of the best little blues bands on this Island that you’ve never heard of—Blue Switch (they do need a new name).

In my college days, I had a drawing by Jules Feiffer on my wall of a young woman in motion. The caption read: To Dance is to Live! To Live is to Dance!

And ain’t that just so.

The Blue Switch returns to the P.A. Club on Nov. 22.