A Cape Cod Notebook

I’ve always thought Nantucket was rather flat — elevation-wise, that is. Our highest point is the Madaket Landfill, and after that is Altar Rock in the moors.

We all mark seasons in different ways, often using holidays like Labor Day past, Thanksgiving upcoming. For me, the circle always wheels around the constellation Orion.

I was leading a tour out in ’Sconset the Thursday before Labor Day when a local eyed us warily and said, “Summer’s over, it’s time for you people to leave.” Ouch! Now Labor Day has come and gone, the curtain falling on summer.

My chum, who these days walks the Outer Beach more often than I do, commented that “high tides are reaching further up the beach than they used to.”

The hound has gifted me a new image of hope. And it looks like an otter.

Where do you seek the soul of Cape Cod? The pounding surf on the Outer Cape? The stalwart beacon of Coast Guard Light? The broad stretch of the Great Marsh?

It’s August on Nantucket, and to find a place where you will be alone and undisturbed, you need one of two things. You either need a four-wheel drive or a boat. The other Saturday, thanks to a good friend and some borrowed kayaks, we set off from Barrett’s Pier and headed for the Madaket Ditch.

Among Cape Cod’s remarkable attributes is a way of surfacing when and where you least expect it – associations, affiliations, allusions, connections, a single degree of separation among strangers.

We all mark time in different ways. For me, it’s the dry cleaner.I have been dropping off clothes to the same dry cleaner in Hyannis since a week or so after I moved here fulltime in 1974 – that’s 50 years ago.

People say half-facetiously that we should accept reality and change the name of this sandspit to Cape Dog.

The air is so thick, there’s little difference between walking and swimming these days. High summer fog brings a certain relief to the island.

I come today to sing the praises of the simple sweatshirt.

This is embarrassing, but maybe making a public admission could save me hundreds of hours of expensive psycho-therapy:I have a thing going on — with a tree.

Lady Slippers are in a class of their own, so strangely shaped, with their pink pouched petals.

Birdsong, five in the morning. A sign that my neighborhood — a relatively new affordable housing subdivision — has matured. My neighbors’ trees provide plenty of places for songbirds to perch.

About six o’clock one evening, as we were about to sit down to dinner, there came from the other end of the house a loud thunk, as though something had hit a window. I stepped outside to see what the noise was.

During the third week of May, when the oak leaves are still just pink flickers in the forest canopy, and the pitch pines had not yet begun painting the landscape with their dry yellow swaths of pollen, then the lowly huckleberry spreads its emerald scarves far and wide throughout the forest floor.

A white postcard showed up in the mail the other day. I had been summoned to Barnstable Superior Court – for jury duty.My immediate response? Great! Hope I can do it!