May 2007 – Page 3 – Sippican Cottage

Desperate End-Stage Monomaniac Cape Cod Fireplace Delirium

May 18, 2007 No Comments

Yesterday, astoot reader and commenter Pastor Jeff remarked on our Cape Cod fireplace photos:

The third one from yesterday looks a lot like my in-laws’ den in Wisconsin.

You can feel the room from the photo — the squeak of the leather, probably a slightly musty, comfortable smell, the crackle of the fireplace, an odor of smoke, possibly the feel of a cool glass in one’s hand, the rustle of a newspaper or the turning of the page in a novel already read many times. Very nice — a room for quiet reading or pleasant conversation — a hobbity sort of room.

That’s a lovely picture he’s painted there. Makes you want to go to Wisconsin and go fishing and get a sunburn and so forth. But I’m not sure it’s very Cape Coddy.

Well, of course it can be Cape Cod recently, but it’s because we’re living in the shambles of an earlier civitas. The original fireside of the Cape Cod house has a spare, almost chaste quality to its appearance. There’s a sort of nobility to the plainness of it; a kind of luxurious asceticism. Grim, humorless bonhomie. They’d put out traps for hobbits.

The scene our internet friend has described reminds me more of the freshwater version of the fireside we’ve got around here; Lake Winnepesaukee. Egad, don’ t get me started about that. Let’s have Cape Cod one more day.

And out into the world, in our crooked way, we go:

Full-Blown Obsessive-Compulsive Cape Cod Fireplace Syndrome

May 17, 2007 4 Comments

I’m so far down this rabbit hole at this point, the rabbits are talking Mandarin. I can’t help myself. I want to look at fireplaces from Cape Cod until ten suns wink out. Or until I get to Race Point. Whatever comes first.

Full-Blown Obsessive-Compulsive Cape Cod Fireplace Syndrome

May 17, 2007 No Comments

I Can’t Help Myself -More Cape Cod Fireplaces

May 16, 2007 No Comments

I’m in a sort of Cape Cod Fireplace Psychosis now. I can’t think of anything else.

I came in at the tail end of Cape Cod as a sort of summer sinkhole of tourists and a desolate spit of sand, fish, and cranberries the other three seasons of the year. I remember distinctly walking along the little aretes between the bogs to get from my grandmother’s tiny cottage to the little local market. The bogs are all houses now, and there’s a supermarket there instead of a tiny store.

Everybody lives everywhere now. I don’t begrudge anybody the things I want for myself. But it was piquant to summer among the scrub pines and sit in the old houses by the fire in the early evening, cast away from the scrum of everyday workaday life.

Cape Cod Fireplaces

May 15, 2007 No Comments

It’s cool in the mornings this time of year on Cape Cod.

In the evening, too. People who remember when Cape Cod had real seasons, because it didn’t have a substantial year-round population, remember what it’s like to be in a lonesome cottage by the shore before the tourists show up. The tourists live there all the time now. And it’s never cold because the houses are modern and weather is something you watch on television.

The old-fashioned locals know that summer doesn’t begin, really, until July Fourth. Memorial Day is a head fake. You might as well swim at the Arctic Circle as Nauset in May or June.

Locals don’t swim, anyway. They have boats, and sit by the fire in the evening, or in the morning in the milky early sunshine, and wait for the visitors to come. Or to go.