The S Word

Last week, everyone I knew was afraid to say the word, even though it was a propitious “First Day of S…” falling on the equinox and all. We skirted around saying “spr…” and “s..” and “s..w”.

As Easter arrived, I had to admit that I was still a bit skeptical. You see, the last chunks of s... have almost, but not quite, melted into the aqua filter.  The gargantuan four-foot pile surrounding the A Frame and lining Old Wharf Road is no more.

On Head of Meadow beach in Truro, the Frances, a 3-masted barque wrecked in 1872, made an appearance during the low tides this winter.

Ice floes that washed in for weeks on the shores of Corn Hill and Duck Harbor beaches have disappeared.

April is about the sounds - cars pulling back into driveways empty since Thanksgiving weekend, rakes and saws; the general business of a seasonal place getting ready to open.

As if lying in wait, gangs of wild turkeys burst out on Route 6, causing a slow down in early morning traffic simultaneous to return of robin red breasts, chickadees, woodpeckers heard throughout the morning and into the twilight hours. Crocuses are cautiously making an appearance.  

Officially, the weekend before spring break is when everything really starts. At Mac's shack by the old pier, newly hired employees are out sanding and re-staining the outdoor furniture. Restaurants along route six have also shown signs of return.  Owners or day workers are our scrubbing the windows, re-grading the driveways and getting fresh clam and oyster shells spread in the parking lots. 

The color of the ocean is an inexplicable blue, so different from the turmoil of bottle green pummeling the shore and leaving behind bits of debris, buoys ripped loose from lobster traps, old bottles of gatorade, driftwood and piles of rocks.

March came in like a lion, and out like a lion this year; the lamb having been sacrificed for another late season snowfall. Now that the s.. is out, somehow, the longest winter in history doesn't feel like it was that bad, but more like an adventure rewarded with plenty of snow days.

But March was a difficult month for me. It was heavy and dark and l-o-n-g, then surprising me with daylight savings time before I was ready for it. At long last, light began streaming in my windows, but only as I was settling in for the night. It left me discombobulated.

I had a birthday too. Getting older is not easy. So easy to type, right?  I know it's a fact of life, and I have a choice to do it gracefully, (and yes, I am entertaining some facial updates), but I feel completely unprepared for the changes that are beginning to set in. I didn't think I'd be so exhausted, emotional and worried about the broken hip I didn’t get when I slipped on the ice in my driveway. 

Just last month, my brother told me I should write a book about being positive, and changing one’s life, and all I could think about was how I couldn’t remember anything. Most days, I feel like I’m on that spinning ride that keeps going faster and faster, the concentric forces preventing me from getting off. Maybe it’s just the promise of spring that Jobim sings about in the Waters of March; the rush of life, of being so close to nature out here in Wellfleet that the slightest alteration has an affect on my being...from the change in late afternoon light to the collective joy in my Saturday morning yoga class when we share news about hearing the peepers the previous evening or the sighting of athe flock of Bohemian Waxwings in South Truro.

A stick, a stone, it's the end of the road     

It's the rest of a stump, it's a little alone

 
It's a sliver of glass, it is life, it's the sun

It is night, it is death, it's a trap, it's a gun

The oak when it blooms, a fox in the brush

The knot in the wood, the song of a thrush

The will of the wind, a cliff, a fall

A scratch, a lump, it is nothing at all

It's the wind blowing free, it's the end of the slope

It's a beam, it's a void, it's a hunch, it's a hope

And the river bank talks of the waters of March

It's the end of the strain, it's the joy in your heart

The foot, the ground, the flesh and the bone

The beat of the road, a slingshot's stone

A fish, a flash, a silvery glow

A fight, a bet, the range of a bow

The bed of the well, the end of the line

The dismay in the face, it's a loss, it's a find

A spear, a spike, a point, a nail

A drip, a drop, the end of the tale

A truckload of bricks in the soft morning light

The sound of a shot in the dead of the night

A mile, a must, a thrust, a bump,

It's a girl, it's a rhyme, it's a cold, it's the mumps

The plan of the house, the body in bed

And the car that got stuck, it's the mud, it's the mud

A float, a drift, a flight, a wing

A hawk, a quail, the promise of spring

And the river bank talks of the waters of March

It's the promise of life, it's the joy in your heart

A snake, a stick, it is John, it is Joe

It's a thorn on your hand and a cut in your toe

A point, a grain, a bee, a bite

A blink, a buzzard, a sudden stroke of night

A pass in the mountains, a horse and a mule

In the distance the shelves rode three shadows of blue

And the river bank talks of the waters of March

It's the promise of life in your heart, in your heart

A stick, a stone, the end of the road

The rest of a stump, a lonesome road

A sliver of glass, a life, the sun

A knife, a death, the end of the run

And the river bank talks of the waters of March

It's the end of all strain, it's the joy in your heart

Songwriter

ANTONIO CARLOS JOBIM

In Wellfleet, the post season doesn’t mean watching your team sputter out in the pennant race, completely obliterating all chances for a World Series, (“I can’t watch the Sox”, wrote Matt Tibbi in Rolling Stone and I quite agreed). 

No, post season begins after the Main Street flood of 20,000 people, in town for the annual Oysterfest, have receded off-Cape to their homes.  PJ’s, The Beachcomber and Laughin’ Lobster mounted their “See You in April” signs late Saturday night, the same block letters that greeted me when I drove across the Bourne Bridge last April. By Monday October 15th, only 25% of the restaurants in town remain open and 90% of the homes will remain empty until June 2013.

Months have passed since I left and returned to the Cape. Summer feels like ages ago, a whole other person ago, as if August were the division between the old and New Year. For most of the month, I was living on the Karissa, a '70s Chris Craft houseboat, motors removed, sharing less than 75 feet with a man I have been involved with on and off for the past three years. I’ve managed to tell no one except my sister, and, with more vagueness than necessary, my mother. I didn't stay on the phone longer than five minutes with anyone. 

That this sometimes on, most times off again relationship flickered on again should surprise no one. I have been nothing short of reckless in matters of the heart since 1997, when, on an ill-fated evening, I hosted a dinner party and met a rotund, balding Texan and traded my good sense with a bad habit I just can’t seem to quit, like smoking and the New York Times crossword. 

What can I say? Steak on the grill, corn on the cob and my favorite ice cream in the freezer easily bamboozle me.  Except for a few day trips here and there, I was anchored to the marina, baking homemade granola, blending up green smoothies, half-heartedly doing yoga on the dock and undoing the mind body spirit routine I had established in Wellfleet. When I finally pulled out my favorite bright tangerine orange cords, they were tight around the ass. That’s what this trip to the moon on gossamer wings does to you. Widens the load. Takes up valuable space.

Two weeks into August, one of the librarians called to inform me that “… someone has, well, they’ve torn down your sign for housing and crumpled it up.  If you want to send another, I’d be happy to post it.” My ‘fleetian friend Karen later tells me to brush it off as “Augustitis”, a condition born from overly crowded markets, beaches and restaurants combined with surly impatience for the bloat to be gone.  I’ve since observed, however, that living in a community reliant on such a large seasonal populace is that when everyone “other” finally does leave, it feels as if you’re empty of breath, are strangely bewildered with the absence of energy, and a bit angry too – somewhat like a sugar crash, a symptom I was quite familiar with, especially after the seduction by homemade salted caramel ice cream and coffee in bed.

During my lie-in on the Karissa, I negotiated my lease, returning mid-September enthused, signing up for Beekeeping classes, outlining the film studies workshop I am conducting at the library for middle and high-schoolers, helping my neighbors cover the garden with sea hay until the spring and working with my friend Peter to organize volunteers for the Modern House Trust, and looking forward to the Wellfleet Oysterfest, the last big party of the year. 

Ray, the first familiar face I saw picked me up off the ground and said, "So you're back? For good!?" I said yes, but it is unlikely I will be able to stay here, notwithstanding the winter.  (“Quiet” is the common adjective I get from everyone I ask about the dark season). Putting down roots is a challenge. The Cassick Valley cottage is secured through June 30^th until I join the “Wellfleet Shuffle”, due to the shortage of year round housing; unless you are lucky or well connected enough to find it.  For the rest of us, rent will double during the high season of July and August. Another setback is that these rentals are certain to be furnished by the AIM Thrift Store, the swap shop at the transfer station or IKEA,  making it difficult to decorate with things that allow you to call it “home”, or in my case, get out of storage.

This morning, I calculated that over the past five years I have spent, get ready for it, $15,000 on storage. Maybe a little less, maybe a little more, but that about sums it up. I hesitated before I multiplied five years times twelve months times the rental cost, recalling Brian’s advice as I was instructing his men on how I wanted the unit organized.  "You shouldn't be worrying about that.  You should be worrying about where you are going to be moving to next. And I would recommend that you find that place within a year.' "You're right.” I repeat this out loud a few more times, ingraining this knowledge into my psyche. I trusted Brian. He was a solid guy, had moved me twice already, from Silver Lake to Highland Park to Eagle Rock to Pasadena, the location of my first storage unit.

           

I’ve cross-referenced my ideal “life” list with Wellfleet, and it fulfills almost all of my requirements, (a community of intelligent, progressive, creative people, close to an airport, the ocean, volunteer opportunities, etc), except this one: gainful employment. 

The community is warm and welcoming, full of salty fishermen and artists. There are lots of gardeners, activists, writers, and painters.  It would be easy for me to have my own radio show, join a play reading group, get on the affordable housing committees, but I cannot even begin to think about rooting down here without buying a property and that is not feasible without a full time job, a rarity on the outermost Cape. And yes, I thought about filling out an application, but working the evening shift at the Mobile gas station is not something I want to do.

I’m also facing the hard reality that my dream of USC’s Graduate School program comes with an expensive price tag, no less than $40,000, of which I am ineligible for student aid, making it economically impractical for me to enroll without the guarantee of a job. In almost every state, open teaching positions are limited to Math, Science (even EXXON Mobil is promoting the president’s initiative) and Speech pathologists; which, strangely, I qualify for with my “Speech & Theatre” degree from Wagner College.

But I can’t reconcile working my way into the system by teaching ESL when the whole point of shifting gears mid - third career was to share the subjects I love to young minds taking flight into the world of post-high school.  So, I’ve joined the many who have banked their aspirations until a retirement wave of English and Theatre teachers begins.

At the end of this autumn, the trees fat with leaves quickly steeping to brown waiting for the right moment, the right gust of wind (apparently it wasn’t Sandy) to blow them all off at once, I've been told that I wander, but maybe I love too many places.  

A friend from California tells me “Come home, you’ve been gone too long.”

"It is confidence in our bodies, minds, and spirits that allows us to keep looking for new adventures, new directions to grow in, and new lessons to learn—which is what life is all about." —Oprah Winfrey

Anticipation...

The parking lot at Ballston Beach is wide open but for one truck.  Sand spills out onto the pavement. Tiny laminated signs are stapled to fencing, poking up through the dunes, pleading with walkers to protect the fragile grass and monarch butterflies.

The timpani of the ocean on the other side quickens my pace over the windswept path to the great horizon, outlined by the changing turbulent color of the sea.  It is a vast and amazing site that never ceases to stun me with gratitude. 

I have not been on this beach since I was a young teenager. We loved the surf here, higher than any we had ever jumped around in before, toes grazing the ocean floor while the swell carried you high and deposited you three feet from your spot, pre-boogie board style.

The water remained about a foot high during the low tides, and we would lie down on your belly closer to shore, leaning on elbows or crawl out, catching the waves as they rumbled in, rolling down through the dips in the ocean floor every six feet or so, causing a diminishing effect before breaking up entirely on the shore line. 

The serenity of the solitary shore was a siren’s call to which the ocean responded moodily.  High tide was four hours away, but waves were tumbling in with the tide, faster and more ferocious than on other parts of the National Seashore.  This is what made Ballston one of our favorites, the unpredictable Mother Nature, the reason our parents warned us before going into the water “Respect the ocean… and watch the undertow”.

It was on this beach that the ancestors of these waves carried my brother Phil away.  He was just eight years old that June, the youngest in the crowd of children packed into the Volvo.  When we finally heard my sister say, “Where’s Phil?” my friend stood up from our little tidal pool, shaded her eyes and pointed out towards the sun.  His head was bobbing out there. Way, way out there. We cupped our hands together and yelled his name, but I don’t think he would have been able to hear us.

My older brother Frank and his friend Paul orchestrated a rescue, first running in the water as fast as they could and then hurling themselves into the swells, badly butterflying their way towards Phil. I think Mark Spitz was still quite popular then, as was his signature stroke.

It was low tide after all, but getting past that first round of waves was a heroic feat. After that, the three of them walked in to shore where we stood in a line watching. Our family friend, aptly named BIG JIM for his enormous size, puffed on his Newport 100s nervously and shouted at all of us. No one was exempt.   Big Jim & Mary were old family friends visiting us from Harrisburg, PA.  I don’t know how Jim drew the short straw, but he was here, looking after all of us on his own. We were nine children total, ranging in age from 8 to 16. 

For his own four, it was their first time ever to the ocean. By the time Frank, Paul and Phil hit beach, Jim shouted, “Don’t you ever do that again! Ever!” his voice boomed out, and he practically hurled us toward the car. Afternoon over.

That night, the four adults stood admonishing us, Jim with the threat of his belt, stomping up and down the stairs to show us just how upset he was. "I’m going to get the belt if that EVER happens again". At some point, my mother and Mary started laughing, covered their mouths, and slunk into the kitchen, leaving us kids crowded on the beaten up couch with my father and Jim pointing fingers, sweating and threatening “The Belt”.

At breakfast the next day, my mother sternly said to anyone who was in listening distance, “You will not take your eyes off of your father or Big Jim. You will not go out over your waist. You will hold on to your younger brother’s hand”.

But despite these explicit instructions and the threat of Jim’s enormous belt, Philip was swept out again.  That was the last time we came to Ballston… ever. 

I'm trying to remember where exactly we were, where the blanket and cooler of Schlitz was laid out, but it was over thirty years ago, and I cannot recall the spot. I only remember seeing Phil's head and his little hand waving at us, off on his seaward adventure.

There is no treasure to be found today, with the exception of a broken piece of a brown Labatt’s bottle and the shell of a Mylar balloon. The glass I toss back into the ocean. It is not soft and sanded down enough for a proper sea glass find. There, by the balloon trapped in the sand, small footprints lead off the beach, towards the high house on the northern side of the parking lot. A small voice is tossed down by the breeze as if to match the prints.

The beach is almost naked. No footprints save the child’s, no rocks, stones or shells either, just soft warm sand and high cliffs sheltering nesting plovers who quickly fly back and forth over the water, darting into invisible habitats. 

On the highest cliff, men are taking off the shutters of a house facing the southeast. It is the last week of April, and people are starting to open their houses for the summer. Restaurants, hotels, cabins, campgrounds and shops are all prepping for May 1st, with new coats of paint and annuals spilling out of wine cask planters. 

May, I believe, marks the beginning of the season. The temperature has dropped again to 50 degrees, but the sun belies the cold front, and the light has changed accordingly to an early summer sky, with a twilight stretching out past the eight o’clock hour. 

The depressions in the beach had changed during our walk, and natural berms were beginning to catch the tail end of the white foam before it stripped back to the sea.  The clouds were like a cartoon train has puffed them out.   You're always on a curve on the ocean side of Cape Cod, there is a mystery around the corner, and each beach is different, has it's own personality.

April's End * Wellfleet, MA

  

I have been let in to a secret club, witnessing this old whaling town unfold itself and embrace the divinity in a season's change. The weather is too terribly romantic. Smoking chimneys keep the chill at bay, houses' driftwood gray blend into the overcast skies with bright colored tulips as a striking contrast.  These are the kind of days when I would skip high school, driving out to the ocean just to say hello.

For most of April, Route 6 has been devoid of traffic. Signs on old roadside motels sport large V A C A N T letters, although The Wellfleet Motel distinguishes itself with a “Squeaky Clean” promise on its sign.

Lecount Hollow Beach

I want to revisit all of the places I discovered last year and see how they differ in the off-season.  Following Main to Commercial Street and out to Mayo Beach, all the galleries, the fish markets, Emack & Bolio's Ice Cream; almost everything is shuttered for the season with hand printed signs cheerfully sporting either “See You Next Summer!” or “Opening After April 20th".  About ten vendors brave the elements at the famous weekend flea market hosted in the Wellfleet Drive-In's parking lot looking at present, like an over sized garage sale.

By the town pier, the winter wind has toppled the “E” from the “Pearl” Bistro sign atop the roof.  Fishermen are at work. I can see their trucks parked on the sandy bottom of the marsh as I cross the Herring River bridge.  They are out with the tide, harvesting, dragging traps and buckets behind them.  

The briny smell of seaweed is so strong that when I open my mouth, the coats the top layer of my tongue.  Pep and I are walking around an inlet called The Gut towards Great Island Beach, but it is the smell a rotting carcass of a dolphin that makes my eyes smart as we make our way over the path ofe tumbled reeds towards the sound of the ocean.The skin is blackened as if been burned by the sun.  Congealed blood creeps along the edges of the exposed rib cage.  The tail is gone, a bony stump remains. It doesn’t make sense to me that this dolphin should be so far away from the ocean, alone, caught in the marshy low tide and not able to get out. One of the shopkeepers told me that 180 dolphins beached themselves this winter, and 120 died; cause unknown.

Two hawks have been hovering in concentric circles around Sgt P. With those ears and the way he bounces along, I’m sure he looks just like a bunny just in time for Easter. I wave my arms and yell, “SHOO! SHOO!”, but that tactic fails. They continue to glide in circles above us.  The winter beach is seagull turf and when we reach the dunes, the hawks float off in the distance towards the sanctum of the pine trees, past the big empty house facing Provincetown. The windows have not been boarded up like most residences. The house has been left exposed and uncloaked, free for anyone to peek inside.

The tide is low, but the waves are moody, and don't offer the same stretches of sandbars that the longs days of summer bring with it. The late April waves have thrown up big rocks and broken shells and rough sand out of the depths. I read today that a boy in Oregon found a soccer ball belonging to another little boy in Japan. I have always had that childhood fantasy - finding that message in a bottle, a stranger to connect with across the sea, like the transatlantic telegraph cable that lies between the United States and Europe.

I take the boardwalk back, avoiding the death.  The hawks return their steady spirograph flight plan, snaking their way towards us.

The Wellfleet Market closes at 4:00 PM until May 1st, and I make it just in time for the manager to let me in, but she quickly locks the door after me repeating, "We close at 4!”   You can tell by the organic aisle, the stocked books fresh off The New York Times bestseller list, and the variety of magazines, that this town has a liberal majority. Whenever I see multiple cork boards in towns advertising drum circles, free yoga and lectures, I expect to hear Pete Seeger singing for peace at the traffic light.

Past the market and next to the Lighthouse Grill is the Spirits Shoppe & Package Store. There are white plastic chairs lined up four and four on each side of the doorway. Men of all ages are shooting the breeze. People wave from cars and say hello.  One man on the far end holds a folded paper and pencil in hand. As I cross the street to the church parking lot with my tomatoes, I hear a boy behind me shout from his car "Hey, you need help with the puzzle?"

At the end of the week, the temperature rises to 80 degrees. The earth smells like it is composting itself, cracking open the acorns and heating up the late spring bulbs. Surfers have taken off their wetsuits. With this change in weather comes glorious sunsets.

We went to the Great Island Beach about 7:15 tonight, just as the tide was coming in and twilight was leaving the sky a pale sea glass blue, a color that is one of the rarest to find. Pink bottomed clouds stretch out across the horizon. “Red sky at night, Sailor’s delight…” I think to myself.    At the big house, the sun's descent is firing off the panes of glass as if the entire place is about to go up in flames.

The Outermost Girl

While I was still living at Tudor City, The Outermost House arrived in the mail, part of a traveler’s book exchange I had long forgotten about. I carried the slim paperback from place to place with me, never cracking the worn spine until this January when I found it in a box I had shipped to Moloka’i.

The Outermost House was a small, simple structure built on the dunes of Nauset Beach in Eastham, and as I read Henry Beston’s 1928 memoir, I was swept up in his description of living on the Atlantic ocean. That I had a vacancy in my housing situation after returning to the mainland was perfect timing. I had become enchanted with Wellfleet, the wrist of the Cape Cod's long arm and by chance, one town north of Eastham.  I wasn’t aspiring to update Beston’s beautiful portrait of that moody year and half on the ocean. Mostly, I was motivated by a sentimental urge to elongate the meager vacation weeks I have spent on the eastern shores these past few Augusts. 

My first introduction to the ocean, any ocean, was the great 40 mile Cape Cod National Seashore, a memory kept alive year round in our house by an enormous oil painting of J.F.K. standing with his Ray Bans, khakis and a turquoise blue polo shirt on what is, most likely, a Hyannis beach. My father bought it right off the wall at Carbone’s Restaurant in Hopkinton, MA during one of the few times we dined out as a family.   I remember that night, the decisive twinkle in his eye as he left the booth and we saw him walk over to the manager. That painting hung above the kitchen table, and over the years, the dining room and the top of the stairs, always a reminder of August.

For six summers, we vacationed in Truro, where my father’s family had also spent their summer. Throughout my life, the recollection of those weeks has heartened me, acting as a refuge from other things I don’t want to remember.  A few years, I thought about buying one of the campground cottages on Martha’s Vineyard, and I struggled in that decision, but the Cape is a tie that binds – having held fast to that blue collar, Yankee sensibility, sandy dirt roads that lead you off the beaten path to glacier kettle ponds and marshy oyster beds and small sized cottages that are truly just for summer enjoyment, rented year to year, passed on from generation to generation.  

I drove straight from New York City and the set of a TV pilot I had been working on, hurling off Route 495 onto the entrance of the Bourne Bridge while Bob Segar crooned “We’ve Got Tonight”. It could have been 1984, driving to Harwich in the Taylor’s tricked out Caprice Classic station wagon.

Suzanne didn’t have her license, but she had the Chevy, and all of us would take turns driving it through our junior and senior years of high school.  In my mind’s eye, I can see Robin, Suzanne, Karen… all of sixteen or seventeen years old, trying to hold our breath as a precaution just in case the bridge collapsed into the water, laughing through gulps of breath once we spanned the other side of this solid, iron and steel structure that plopped you at the Upper Cape Cod rotary and the familiar Christmas Tree Shop.

At Exit 1, bogs were shimmering with their singular cranberry color.  Daffodils and forsythia were in their familiar blooming shades of yellow. The glow of green buds had not yet appeared on the oak trees that line the rural parts of 6A, leaving the bark naked and gray, arms reaching towards the sun, supplicant, wishing it to warm up already.  For the past two weeks, the temperature has been at war, fluctuating between 45 and 70 degrees.  

I have rented a small cottage at the bottom of a development named Cassick Valley Way. There is no valley, just a ditch separating the house from the bike path, thick with saplings and fallen leaves and I learn from the note left on the refrigerator, ticks. It is bright at this time of year, before the leaves fill in, due to a huge skylight that extends over the open kitchen-dining-living room.

I wanted to see the ocean as soon as possible. Being near water always calms me. Even amidst the noise and haste of New York, I would be noticeably out of sorts if I missed a day walking Pepper along the East River.  Our nearest beach is Lecount Hollow, about a mile away, past PB’s French Bistro, the South Wellfleet General Store and the entrance to the Cape Cod Rail Trail, a bike path that runs 22 miles from Wellfleet to Dennis.

In the small parking lot at Lecount, four SUVs were parked facing the ocean. The sun hadn’t quite set behind us, leaving the daylight to linger and encouraging Pepper to bound down the steep, sandy incline that acts as an entrance to the beach.

A large piece of driftwood has been laid gently across the seat of an old wicker chair, sitting stoically at the bottom of the incline. With this exception, the beach is free of any footprints. Perhaps the outgoing tide had erased the evidence of walks taken earlier in the day; but it left an old lobster pot, lying abandoned in a low tidal pool. This is a great find – perfect for 75 Cassick Way’s #4 cottage. 

Without thinking, I splashed in, getting my shoes and the bottoms of my jeans soaked, struggling to drag it to higher ground, a sand bar that separates us from the rocky beach.  Small barnacle clusters covered the wood, the numbers “8901” were branded on the top. This must be the owner’s license number, I thought to myself.  I was dismayed to discover that its naked appearance belies how heavy the wood and netting actually is. There is no way this would be part of my take away treasure. 

Later that week, in the same place, I found an old anchor chain, covered with large rocks glued to the metal from the years spent at the bottom of the sea, and again, the tide would conspire against me as I dug out the chain with my bare hands and tried to pull the damn thing out of the wet sand, surrendering it until the next low tide, hoping someone would recognize it for the find it was.  

By the time I reached the parking lot, my pants have a salt line and I was talking aloud to no one in particular.  Two cars roll down their windows. “There’s an old lobster pot down there if one of you want it”. I smiled. They smiled back and roll their windows back up. Maybe this happens all time.

I arrived at the end of April’s first week, not considering how long and lonely the first two weeks would feel, the time it typically takes me to settle into a new place and create a routine. I am a conundrum unto myself. I strive to create community, but position myself in the outermost places, such as Moloka’i, Wellfleet, and even Kip’s Bay.  When I ran this idea past Robin, she said… “I don’t know… sounds like you’re isolating out there.” I can’t really argue. I don’t know anyone here.

As it turns out, I don’t think that will be a problem. The town is filled with interesting and loquacious people who love to talk story.  I have received two dinner invitations, joined a yoga studio and am on a first name basis with the librarians, one who stayed open after hours helping me choose a new book and registering my own Clam Card to borrow it with. And of course, having a poodle that hugs strangers doesn’t hurt.