The weather here has been so insane, windy as hell since October. I stopped paying attention to the cancellation of the boats in March, around the time my world began to get a lot smaller. There is nowhere to go.

In those early days, as the pandemic rippled across the country, moving left to right like words on a page, I listened to for the whistle of the 6:30 boat in the morning and the 10:00 boat at night. It was a comforting sound, a reminder that we were still connected to the world.

This place did a pretty good job of locking itself down, and now we wonder what the future will look like. It is foggy here one out of every three days, on average. Now all of us, nationwide, are enveloped by a fog, the future clouded.

Actually, in those early days, I could not shake thinking about the virus as though it was a fog. I knew otherwise, but I kept envisioning it moving across this place, and all places, as inescapable.

I was so anxious then. I felt like I had an electrical current running through me as I tried to figure out what the next move was going to be. Every night there was another update, a huge story.I wrote this essay for WCAI about this anxiety, and the looming feeling that something was on the horizon, beyond the waves.

Things have ebbed, even though the news gets worse. That is the wild thing about being human, isn’t it? How easily we adapt to the world. Things that seemed insane to us weeks ago, we have accepted.

I wrote this essay, also on WCAI,during the first couple of weeks of this new world. I was crying at every beautiful thing. Now every day feels different. I read somewhere we move through so many emotions in a day during this moment because we aren’t sure how we should be reacting. So we try on emotions and responses rapid-fire until we find one that suits us.

That can make it hard to write! Hell, it makes it hard to do anything. But I find myself dipping into fiction a little more now, editing short stories and trying to get them out there. I like to write about relationships, about weird people living in strange, sandy places. I was writing a scene in a bar and it felt so strange to remember what that was like–to sit close to people, to hold hands, to smell another person at close range.

We are all going to be different people on the other side of this. As someone who writes about memory, I wonder what it is going to feel like to remember this moment.

 

 

As promised, here is the link to February’s Cape Cod Notebook dispatch from yours truly.

I’ve been back and forth between Provincetown and Nantucket a fair bit the last two months as we said goodbye to a friend. I’ve been looking at a lot of old photos of my friends and family, and myself. Photos I hadn’t seen before, didn’t know were taken. It can be disorienting, to try to reconcile the self you once were with the self you are now. I feel like I have been this same person for quite a long while. But perhaps there will be another moment in time when I look back at myself now and feel she is just as far away as I do when I look at my childhood self. I guess only time will tell. Time is a luxury though, eh? To imagine that we will all still be here in this place twenty, thirty, fifty years from now seems…what? Overly hopeful?

Well, here’s hoping.

 

 

Many of my winter dispatches from Nantucket/Cape Cod involve, in one way or another, the isolation of this place. Isolation and solitude are different things, as is loneliness, and each on its own can be alright, depending. All three compound one another!

 

So if you missed January’s Cape Cod Notebook from me, you can click over and listen to it here.

Next week, on 2/18, you can listen to a new essay about memory. Have you ever looked at a photo of yourself that you couldn’t believe was of yourself? It’s kind of about that. capeandislands.org if you are beyond the reach of our radio waves, or 90.1 fm if you are on cape cod, or 91.1 fm on Nantucket.

I will have an essay coming out in Canary Magazine about looking at your body and the natural world, and feeling like you have no control over either. Not sure when it’s coming out but I’ll post it here when it does!

Here are two Cape Cod Notebook essays from this year end I have yet to post over here:

trying to love November 

wind season

The essay I find myself thinking about the most this winter is this one,here and now, from August. Lately I have been thinking that the two things that worry me the most are ideas of birth and death. And I guess, everything in between.

It was a good year for reading. Some of the books I enjoyed the most this year were:

The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd

Casting Into the Light by Janet Messineo

Outpost by Dan Richards

The Great Beach by John Hay

The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

 

some of the books I re-read every year are:

The Outermost House by Henry Beston

The House on Oyster Creek by Heidi Jon Schmidt

Thoreau’s Cape Cod

I seriously revised a manuscript and wrote two more this year. Every year I wonder what ideas will come to me and I continue to be surprised that they do. All the words add up.

Perhaps best of all, I took so many walks in the sand with wonderful people.

See you in 2020.

 

 

 

 

 

 

It was a strange end of the summer, I got sick right at the beginning of October and my fall swims were put on hold. I keep thinking one of these days will be warm enough to dive in again, but it hasn’t happened yet. I wrote about it all, wearing my sandy heart on my sleeve, for the radio this week. You can listen here. 

 

You can listen to an essay about my time on the backshore in the dunes tomorrow, Tuesday 9/24 on WCAI or on capeandislands.org.

 

Here is the link

 

 

last week’s Cape Cod Notebook, if you missed it, about memory and time. And the fog. And I wonder what it would be like to live beyond the horizon line.

 

click the link above, or right here, to listen

 

Summer on the Cape and Islands is our busiest time of the year. Now that we are past the solstice, I feel a little sad that each day is getting shorter. There are moments in the evening, around six or seven at night, when a wave hits me, a memory of winter darkness knocking me over. But for now it is still warm and brilliantly bright, and all my essays for WCAI the last month have been, too.

Here’s an essay I wrote and recorded about Nantucket’s landfill. 

I wrote and recorded this essay about reading on Islands in honor of the Nantucket Book Festival.

And most recently is this essay about watching the surfers on Cape Cod.

In other writing news, I’m working away on an essay collection about the disappearing places and ways of life on the Cape and Islands, and reading as much as I can.

 

 

 

 

This week over on A Cape Cod Notebook on WCAI, you can hear my essay about summer jobs. I’ve had a lot of them, and now I have a summer, winter, spring, and fall job. Click to listen/read!

I have been thinking a lot about the idea of timelessness lately. When I was a kid, there were people in Provincetown I thought would live forever, people who never seemed to age. Their houses did, shingles weathering and porches soft and sagging, but their faces looked the same from year to year. I think the salt preserves people who live by the sea.

I moved away, I came back. These people I thought would live forever have all started to die, an entire generation now essentially gone. In a town of only 3,000 people, these figures loomed larger than life–the town historians, the poets, the hippies, and the old women who worked at the school cafeteria in summer and at the fried clam shacks in summer. These were people who’d lived their whole lives in the same three miles of sand, who remembered their neighbor’s lives as well as they remembered their own.

Their houses still remain, purchased by new owners with plans to fix them up, to iron out any inconsistencies. That summer I delivered mail, I nearly fell through one of those sagging porches, so these improvements are certainly needed. The houses show up on a rental site with a cute name, any evidence of their previous owners completely erased.

This weekend in particular has me thinking about time, and the desire to stop or at least slow it. On Nantucket, the last weekend in April is the Daffodil Festival, as it has been for the last 45 years. It is a stunning few days when the weather cooperates. It’s been pouring rain for the last two days and as I write this, the rain looks like it might be letting up in the early morning hours of Saturday. A coordinated campaign to plant thousands of daffodil bulbs along public ways and roads on the island decades ago has resulted in a proliferation of daffodils that bloom each spring.

A hallmark of the Daffodil Festival is an iconic antique car parade. Is there anything closer to time travel than restoring an antique car? There’s an element of bending time to your will, of damning the decades and getting a machine that was built before your grandparents were born to work. I find classic cars entrancing. Or I did, until last year when I started to notice that a few of the cars in the parade proudly displayed the year they came off the assembly line in their windshield–and I found that I was now older than some of the cars considered “antiques.” Maybe I will become one of those timeless people, roaming these sandy towns. Hell, maybe I already am.

It really is something to see the island blanketed with these yellow blooms, each flower lifting their trumpeted heads towards the sun, swaying in the ceaseless wind. One look at my lawn is all you need to know I am no gardener, but there is something compelling about these daffs and how each year they return, with little to no human intervention. The lawn of my grandparents house is littered with daffodil bulbs they planted, and even though they are both dead, their daffodils return year after year.

When the water rises and Nantucket transforms into a new sliver of sand, one I can’t even yet imagine, I hope the daffodils continue to bloom.