summers

Laine and I spent three and a bit days in this converted stable or garage in Rhode Island. Susan Morgan and Tom Lawson had rented it for two weeks and since we were in the area, they invited us to stop by. Susan's been talking about Rhode Island for a few years now, saying it's like Nantucket was in the 70s. That's when Susan and I met, btw.

Is Rhode Island like Nantucket was back in the day? Well, it's a lot easier to get to for one thing.  There's no ferry schedule to figure out for one thing and you're not jamming on a boat with a bunch of other people.

We did get lost.

It was dark and the people living around Little Compton seem to have the attitude that if you don't know where you're going, you don't need to know where you're going. There aren't signs for every street. Some are nice and easy to read reflective white on green. But others are hand-lettered black on white, small signs way up on the side of a tree. They are invisible at night.  The street sign we were looking for was even better disguised, blue-grey, at knee height. We did get directed in by Tom after I figured out that I'd been calling the wrong phone number for hours.

Is it like Nantucket? My memories of Nantucket are so intertwined with my memories of being young and figuring out who I was (or who I was going to be) that it's really impossible to say. It is the Northeast and it was summer. So Rhode Island is like Nantucket forty years ago and it's like Cape Cod fifty-odd years ago and it's an archetype of summer for me.

Here in California, in August, there are a bunch of Naked Lady lilies blooming behind the house. I'd never seen them until I moved to Monterey to teach at CSUMB, but now they're a familiar sign that summer's coming to the close. Rattlesnake grass is another reminder than the days are getting shorter. The color of the sky seems cooler, further away.

But we went to the Cape in August every summer when I was a kid and then it seemed that summer would last forever. Summers when I was in my early twenties also lasted longer than any two or three months. And there was that summer on Nantucket.

When it comes to thinking about it today, I find myself circling around the memories, not really able to get all that close to the young woman I was. It's like glimpses through a scrim, through sliding frames. Maybe it's because it's fall now and summer has slipped away.