Alice | senseofplace

As a fairly solitary child, the physical Cape, when I was growing up, was my best parent and friend. Nantucket Sound, glittering through the picture windows in our living room during the day, brought the sound of the waves like a peaceful breathing through my open window at night. The sea marked the seasons: weir boats meant spring, spinnakers bellying out from the bows of Wiannos meant summer, sea ice lifting and falling with the tide meant winter. The beach and the jetty became my places for explorations, for imaginary games, for finding matching moods for my adolescent self. When I would “run away,” it would be down the beach, starting off in tears but gradually calming until the rhythm of water and wind and the sliding of gulls across the sky would lift away sadness. I would build mermaid gardens in the pools that were cupped in the boulders of the jetty, or hide in the little caves between those great rocks and listen to grownups walking overhead. When I left the Cape for boarding school and got home for vacations, I would always run down to the water even before going into the house. The beauty of the place was my touchstone and I always knew that I would come back to live here when I retired.

Having returned to live on the Cape now as a seventy-year-old woman, more than forty years after I moved away, I find the same wonder in walking the beaches I knew as a child but also have the pleasure of the peopled peninsula. The people I’ve met, whether old Capers or more recent wash-ashores, are an endless source of stimulus: varied and interesting, established or struggling, young or old, they are a marvelous lot! And the possibilities for learning new things and being useful are endless. Although I no longer live within the sound of the sea, the water world is still the Cape to me and I am grateful every day that I have been allowed to come back home again.

Alice Kelley