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Spring Is (Still) Just A Distant Memory

July 7, 2008 3 Comments

[Editor’s Note: First offered two years ago.]
{Author’s note: I should make the editor paint the house.}

The end of July is Summer in New England. There’s no bones about it. The air is heavy with moisture, the heat more like a sauna than an open oven door. The plants get crazy, pushing and shoving in the beds, reaching out to grab at you when you go by. At night, the bugs on the screens blot out the moon.

The ocean is at the foot of the street, mere miles away; and when the breeze tacks, you can catch a whiff of the salt in it. No siren can compose a more alluring sales pitch. It’s delightful to be on the water in July, and there’s always the breeze you need to banish the motor. The sun is like a velvet hammer.

I’m a late summer man. I’m not old, but I’m not young. There’s as much wake behind the boat as horizon in front of it. I don’t mind, really. Consider my house.

That’s it there, in the picture, this spring. When I was younger, I dreamed of this house, and having the family in it. I had no idea how to get it. I wandered the earth, and had many adventures. And eventually, I figured things out, and did an end around, and made the thing happen. I am happy here.

According to the cult of the adolescent, to which we are all expected to pay obeisance unto death, it’s the “wanting” phase of my life I’m supposed to prolong as long as I can manage it. I’m supposed to pretend there is no finish line, and simply ask the starter to raise the pistol over and over again, so I can know the thrill of beginning, forever. I demur.

Life is a career, and then it is over. I do not wish to be an entry level employee until the day I am fired, as it were.

That picture is supposed to encapsulate all that I am supposed to abhor about owning a home. It is no longer new. It requires attention, and effort, to keep it standing and presentable. I’m supposed to want a new one by now, or have covered it with plastic to avoid paying any attention to it. But why would I not want to pay attention to it? It holds everything I’ve ever really wanted. I run my hands over it like a lover, because that’s what I am.

It needs painting. I don’t mind, because I don’t want to go back to the starting line just to hear the pistol.

It All Just Was (A Re-run)

July 6, 2008 2 Comments

Delightful to come to Truro. Never in high season. When the winter has pounded the sand as hard as concrete, and every footprint has been erased; that’s the time to come.

The light is nice in the early spring. The orb of the sun hangs low in the southern sky, even at noon, and reaches into the room and picks out the details in even the most mundane of objects. The owners have such a treasure trove of trash in here. There’s a weird vibe to a room filled with things that aren’t even good enough to throw away. They are like amulets, or sea glass. Like shims under the wobbly legs of someone else’s life. Like finding a totem in the wilderness from a dead religion. Trash too valuable to part with.

The first few times I stayed here, I’d pick up one awful thing after another and wonder: what could possibly make someone bring this into their home, never mind keep it through all these years? What power do these talismans hold for their owners? How can you build an altar of peeling paint and worship this god of kitsch?

I got over it. I’d hear the scree of the spring and the slap of the screen door behind me and wander the sand alone, and divide my hearing between the whistle of the wind, the sigh of the surf, and the shh shh of the dune grass reminding me I was in their nursery. There was no point to the things in the shack, or the lapping of the idiot ocean against the fool earth. In the pale moonlight it all went about its business whether I was awake or not. It all just was.

I’d call the people and tell them I wanted to stay in the cottage where it all just was, and they’d put their hand over the receiver for a moment and I knew they were using the word “daft” to their companion about that fellow that wanted to go where no one wanted to go in a season where no one went anyway. And then they’d come back and say they had checked and there looked to be a hole in the schedule. There’s a hole in Hiroshima, too, I’d think, but not say.

I’ve always liked the little stove. You sit right next to it, and feed it like a baby. You can put your hands right on it after you light a fire in it, and feel the power of the flames slowly mount to warm your hands. It gets too hot in an instant, like many things.

I love a stove. You can feed a stove almost anything on a cold morning. Kindling. Rags. A love letter.

Nothing (Still) Happens Until July 4th

July 3, 2008 4 Comments

Nothing happens on Cape Cod until July 4th.

I worked on Cape Cod for many years. I witnessed various and sundry businessmen down there trying to fight this iron law like a white whale. They’d tow banners from biplanes and make radio ads and hire performers and put out sandwich boards and generally set their hair afire after they got that little flurry of interest and money on Memorial Day. I used to see their businesses slip beneath the foam, tangled in the lines trailing from the leviathan of the springtime’s cold water, high winds, and overcast skies all the time. The smart ones just opened the doors on July 3rd, and sold everything they had until they found themselves unscrewing things from the wall and putting tags on them, and running out of even the banana popsicles.

They’d show up on July Fourth, oh yes. And every Friday afternoon until Labor Day you’d know better than to to try the two bridges that allow you to enter Cape Cod over the canal that makes it an island, really, if you didn’t have two hours to kill. The rentals turn over at Saturday morning at eleven, so don’t try going the other way, then, either.

Let’s go down to Main Street in Harwichport. The Finast has Hood ice cream. And look, the Modern Theater sign says they have talking pictures now.

Month: July 2008

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sippicancottage

A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.

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