One last goodbye
Apologies in advance for how emo I am about to be, but I was going through old photo files on my computer this evening looking for pics I want to make prints of, and I found the photos of the last vacation I had on Nantucket, a week up there in late May 2008 with innostrantsa right after our 10-year reunion at Smith. (The long weekend in September 2009 for my grandmother's funeral doesn't exactly count as a vacation, even though there was plenty of booze and lying on the beach; but it was too short and sad and stressful to be restorative.) That week with Q was one of the few times I've been up there in May, before the summer season really started, and though the wind was still a bit brisk and spring hadn't fully bloomed yet and a lot of places were still closed for the winter, I adored how peaceful and wild it still felt before the summer people descended and the season opened.
I'm glad I took pictures. It's so beautiful, even if it hurts to look at them and know that I'll likely never see any of this in person again.
The view from the widow's walk on top of the house, of the yard all the way out to the water. That's Squam Pond, and then the Atlantic beyond it. The little house on the near side of the pond belongs to Eli Zabar, of the Zabar's Deli family; it has the most beautiful herb garden that I used to go walking in with my mom and grandmother.
The view on sunny days is spectacular. But watching fog roll in off the ocean in the evening was always comforting, as was watching storms come through over it. (I've been up there during more than one nor'easter, and there was nothing so cozy as sitting warm and dry in the house with a cup of tea and a book while watching the waves churning and the rain pouring down.) And when the sun breaks through again, well, it's like magic:
It's about a ten minute walk to the beach: down the driveway, left on Squam Rd., then past a few houses to a little beach trail on the right. The beach trail is bigger and more marked now; when I was little, you had to know where to look for the stone that marked it, or it was easy to miss. Most of the trail was grassy and green (though you really had to watch out for poison ivy, as well as ticks), but about 3/4 of the way in it would switch to sand suddenly. At that point, I'd always kick my shoes off (if I was even still wearing any) and make a dash for it, because that sand was always so hot. So you run up the rise and over the dunes, and then you get to the beach.
My grandfather used to point straight out at the ocean and tell me that if you kept going straight, you'd hit the shores of Portugal; and then he'd tell me a story about how some Nantucket girl did, indeed, find a message in a bottle that had been tossed into the ocean by somebody on a beach in Portugal, and had washed up on a Nantucket beach. It's not the finest sand in the world, really it's a bit course and will exfoliate your feet pretty quickly, but it's that lovely gold color, and when you take the time to look at it for a while (like when you're slowly waking up after dozing tummy-down on your beach towel post-lunch), it's comprised of a myriad of different stones, glass, shells, coral, etc. Those bands of washed-up seaweed where the high tides brought debris in were always a trove of ocean treasure. We used to look for "lucky stones", tide-polished rocks that had a band of a different mineral bisecting them, so that they'd appear to have a white ring around them. We also used to look for skate egg cases, which we called "mermaid purses."
The room that I usually stayed in faced toward the ocean, and I never liked to close the curtains (there's nobody out there to see anything anyway), so I'd always get blinded awake by the sun rising over the ocean, as early as 4:30 am during the peak of summer (the island is at the far eastern edge of the Eastern time zone, after all.) But in the evenings, it was just as lovely to go out on the deck and watch the moon rise over the ocean and the moors. I could never get a good photo of that, though-- the moon always looked so enormous, but in the pictures it looks tiny, and blurry.
And the moors... oh, the moors. I used to walk through deer trails in the moors around our house to Squam Swamp, but there are other, higher and drier, spots elsewhere, dotted with little ponds like sapphires. This is along the Sanford Farm trail, which includes what used to be the old communal sheep pastures back in the Quaker days. Even in late May, not all of the shrubs had leafed out, but this picture also makes me think of autumn, when the high population of wild blueberry bushes would turn the moors scarlet.
There are a lot of deer on the island, partly because the moors are excellent deer habitat, and in part because there aren't any predators to cull the population. Driving, especially at night, on the dirt roads was always an iffy matter and you had to be on the lookout; I've been startled by a deer jumping across my path more than once. At dusk and dawn it was nice to see them come grazing in the yard, as much as my grandfather would yell at them to keep away from the roses and hydrangeas. Okay, so it's not like I will never see a deer or a deer track again. But my grandmother taught me to identify deer tracks on Nantucket when I was little, and though that's a small thing and easily learned somewhere else, it's one of the few unique things that she did only with me and not with my brother or cousins. I can't see a deer track without thinking of her.
There are a few spots of tallish trees on the island, but most of them are more like this, wizened and scraggly and lichen-scaled, hugging the ground to protect against the wind and the elements. The trees I always think of are like this.
And sometimes you can be exploring on a trail that you're sure has come to its end, and then you turn a corner and see that the road goes ever on and on.
Once during every vacation, typically on one of the last nights, we'd have a lobster dinner. When I was very young, my grandfather or my dad would call up the seafood market and put in an order for one big lobster, around 10 or 15 lbs, fresh caught that day, and that would feed the whole family. As we got older and bigger, and lobster more expensive, it would end up being 2 medium sized ones. We'd get them live, stash them in the bathtub or shower for a few hours, and then cook them in the big lobster pot. (And no, I never once heard them "scream"-- either my grandmother's lobster pot had a really heavy soundproof lid, or she eased the temperature up just right, but either way there wasn't that sudden squealing out of steam from their shells.) My grandfather would handle the task of taking the cooked lobster apart and prepping it for the table while my grandmother dished out the coleslaw and I melted the butter. My aunt, ever one for convenience, places orders with a different market for these ready-made lobster meals where each person gets their own plate with a little 1-pounder, already cooked, a cooked ear of corn, and a serving of coleslaw. This was, admittedly, a useful way to go when all 26 of us were up in 2000 for my grandfather's 80th birthday, but it's not how I like to do the family ritual of the lobster dinner. At the end of that week in May 2008, my parents came up to the island for Memorial Day just after innostrantsa flew home, and we had a day together to do the lobster thing.
My dad does like to play with his lobsters.
This was my mom and me on the widow's walk at sunset the last night of that same visit-- probably the only photo I have of us up there from my adult life. It's lopsided because I was trying to do the Myspace-angle self portrait thing, and we're both squinting hard because we're facing the setting sun, but I still like how it turned out.
When you leave the island on the ferry, rounding Brant Point and passing the Brant Point lighthouse marks the dividing line between the harbor and the open waters of Nantucket Sound. There are always people out on that beach, mostly parents and kids, to wave you hello or goodbye. There's a longstanding Nantucket tradition, not just in our family but throughout the whole island, that if you toss a penny into the water as you round Brant Point, it means you will return to the island. I threw in my penny (and one for innostrantsa too, if I recall-- in our family, you're allowed to proxy for others) as I was leaving in May 2008. When I went back to Nantucket for my grandmother's funeral in 2009, however, we flew from Baltimore rather than driving up to the Cape and taking the ferry, so I never tossed my penny that last time.
In her email from the ferry this morning, my mom wrote:
ACK no longer in sight. No pennies this time. There are other beaches but I will miss this gentle almost cool air, the quiet except for birds and waves, and the smell of the vegetation.
I'm glad I took pictures. It's so beautiful, even if it hurts to look at them and know that I'll likely never see any of this in person again.
The view from the widow's walk on top of the house, of the yard all the way out to the water. That's Squam Pond, and then the Atlantic beyond it. The little house on the near side of the pond belongs to Eli Zabar, of the Zabar's Deli family; it has the most beautiful herb garden that I used to go walking in with my mom and grandmother.
The view on sunny days is spectacular. But watching fog roll in off the ocean in the evening was always comforting, as was watching storms come through over it. (I've been up there during more than one nor'easter, and there was nothing so cozy as sitting warm and dry in the house with a cup of tea and a book while watching the waves churning and the rain pouring down.) And when the sun breaks through again, well, it's like magic:
It's about a ten minute walk to the beach: down the driveway, left on Squam Rd., then past a few houses to a little beach trail on the right. The beach trail is bigger and more marked now; when I was little, you had to know where to look for the stone that marked it, or it was easy to miss. Most of the trail was grassy and green (though you really had to watch out for poison ivy, as well as ticks), but about 3/4 of the way in it would switch to sand suddenly. At that point, I'd always kick my shoes off (if I was even still wearing any) and make a dash for it, because that sand was always so hot. So you run up the rise and over the dunes, and then you get to the beach.
My grandfather used to point straight out at the ocean and tell me that if you kept going straight, you'd hit the shores of Portugal; and then he'd tell me a story about how some Nantucket girl did, indeed, find a message in a bottle that had been tossed into the ocean by somebody on a beach in Portugal, and had washed up on a Nantucket beach. It's not the finest sand in the world, really it's a bit course and will exfoliate your feet pretty quickly, but it's that lovely gold color, and when you take the time to look at it for a while (like when you're slowly waking up after dozing tummy-down on your beach towel post-lunch), it's comprised of a myriad of different stones, glass, shells, coral, etc. Those bands of washed-up seaweed where the high tides brought debris in were always a trove of ocean treasure. We used to look for "lucky stones", tide-polished rocks that had a band of a different mineral bisecting them, so that they'd appear to have a white ring around them. We also used to look for skate egg cases, which we called "mermaid purses."
The room that I usually stayed in faced toward the ocean, and I never liked to close the curtains (there's nobody out there to see anything anyway), so I'd always get blinded awake by the sun rising over the ocean, as early as 4:30 am during the peak of summer (the island is at the far eastern edge of the Eastern time zone, after all.) But in the evenings, it was just as lovely to go out on the deck and watch the moon rise over the ocean and the moors. I could never get a good photo of that, though-- the moon always looked so enormous, but in the pictures it looks tiny, and blurry.
And the moors... oh, the moors. I used to walk through deer trails in the moors around our house to Squam Swamp, but there are other, higher and drier, spots elsewhere, dotted with little ponds like sapphires. This is along the Sanford Farm trail, which includes what used to be the old communal sheep pastures back in the Quaker days. Even in late May, not all of the shrubs had leafed out, but this picture also makes me think of autumn, when the high population of wild blueberry bushes would turn the moors scarlet.
There are a lot of deer on the island, partly because the moors are excellent deer habitat, and in part because there aren't any predators to cull the population. Driving, especially at night, on the dirt roads was always an iffy matter and you had to be on the lookout; I've been startled by a deer jumping across my path more than once. At dusk and dawn it was nice to see them come grazing in the yard, as much as my grandfather would yell at them to keep away from the roses and hydrangeas. Okay, so it's not like I will never see a deer or a deer track again. But my grandmother taught me to identify deer tracks on Nantucket when I was little, and though that's a small thing and easily learned somewhere else, it's one of the few unique things that she did only with me and not with my brother or cousins. I can't see a deer track without thinking of her.
There are a few spots of tallish trees on the island, but most of them are more like this, wizened and scraggly and lichen-scaled, hugging the ground to protect against the wind and the elements. The trees I always think of are like this.
And sometimes you can be exploring on a trail that you're sure has come to its end, and then you turn a corner and see that the road goes ever on and on.
Once during every vacation, typically on one of the last nights, we'd have a lobster dinner. When I was very young, my grandfather or my dad would call up the seafood market and put in an order for one big lobster, around 10 or 15 lbs, fresh caught that day, and that would feed the whole family. As we got older and bigger, and lobster more expensive, it would end up being 2 medium sized ones. We'd get them live, stash them in the bathtub or shower for a few hours, and then cook them in the big lobster pot. (And no, I never once heard them "scream"-- either my grandmother's lobster pot had a really heavy soundproof lid, or she eased the temperature up just right, but either way there wasn't that sudden squealing out of steam from their shells.) My grandfather would handle the task of taking the cooked lobster apart and prepping it for the table while my grandmother dished out the coleslaw and I melted the butter. My aunt, ever one for convenience, places orders with a different market for these ready-made lobster meals where each person gets their own plate with a little 1-pounder, already cooked, a cooked ear of corn, and a serving of coleslaw. This was, admittedly, a useful way to go when all 26 of us were up in 2000 for my grandfather's 80th birthday, but it's not how I like to do the family ritual of the lobster dinner. At the end of that week in May 2008, my parents came up to the island for Memorial Day just after innostrantsa flew home, and we had a day together to do the lobster thing.
My dad does like to play with his lobsters.
This was my mom and me on the widow's walk at sunset the last night of that same visit-- probably the only photo I have of us up there from my adult life. It's lopsided because I was trying to do the Myspace-angle self portrait thing, and we're both squinting hard because we're facing the setting sun, but I still like how it turned out.
When you leave the island on the ferry, rounding Brant Point and passing the Brant Point lighthouse marks the dividing line between the harbor and the open waters of Nantucket Sound. There are always people out on that beach, mostly parents and kids, to wave you hello or goodbye. There's a longstanding Nantucket tradition, not just in our family but throughout the whole island, that if you toss a penny into the water as you round Brant Point, it means you will return to the island. I threw in my penny (and one for innostrantsa too, if I recall-- in our family, you're allowed to proxy for others) as I was leaving in May 2008. When I went back to Nantucket for my grandmother's funeral in 2009, however, we flew from Baltimore rather than driving up to the Cape and taking the ferry, so I never tossed my penny that last time.
In her email from the ferry this morning, my mom wrote:
ACK no longer in sight. No pennies this time. There are other beaches but I will miss this gentle almost cool air, the quiet except for birds and waves, and the smell of the vegetation.