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Preparing for winter on Nantucket

Mary Bergman

The other day I was walking down Hinkley Lane and thought I heard a downy woodpecker, but it was only the sound of new siding going up: uniform and precise, of a nail meeting soft cedar shakes, yielding. All throughout the island, the quiet of the coming winter is punctuated with buzz saws, pneumatic nail guns, and the overlapping sounds of competing radios at a dozen different job sites, all within spitting distance of the other. Deep in the woods, except on Sundays, camouflaged hunters sit like a bird on a wire, perched on spindly stands in thinning trees. By the time this airs, shotgun season will be over.

My sister out in Greenfield has a sticker on her card that reads: love is maintenance, maintenance is love. (Is this why my car won’t pass inspection?) I guess I am trying to maintain my world a little more this winter, starting with some long-abandoned tasks around the house. I repaired a window screen that my hammock crash-landed into six years ago. I finished a paint job that once mocked me daily. On a day when the wind was down, Becky even scrambled onto the shed roof to scrape plastic sheeting off my attic window, left by the builder long ago.

I spent years feeling like I never really lived here. I hung a mirror that had been in the basement for too long, something rescued from the side of Hooper Farm Road on a hot summer day. I listened and measured to find the studs to anchor it; I made it level. Now I can sit in my bed and watch the tall grasses outside my window as they go to seed, illuminated by slanted winter light. Outside, the wind surges and shakes loose the curls from my hair. The wind erodes entire dunes; I’m getting off easy.

Once the hunters are gone, winter is a good time to wander, through conservation lands, across lawns, down lanes that you might not generally dare to walk in the high season. The trees have thinned out and there is more to see. Even in the moors, glimpses of blue harbor rise up over every high elevation. Walking single file along a rickety boardwalk, cinnamon ferns snapped at our ankles. In the cold quiet of Stump Pond, I was happy to see a part of the island I hadn’t visited in years. I did not have to worry that I didn’t really know where I was going, I just kept following. I think I could live here another ten years and there would still be more to see. Maybe it was the bare tupelo trees that allowed me to see, for a moment, for what seemed like miles. But the fog rolled in out here, like it always does.

So now I’m back walking the bike path, where there is not much of a view. I look at the two rooms I live in; there is more to do. The wind has already twisted my screen door off its hinges this week. I am trying to make weathervane out of an old paddle that washed up in September’s big storm. I am terrified to get up on a ladder but I will do it. If it’s going to be so windy, I might as well have a directional. I’ll turn up the radio to drown out the strange sounds my car is making. Somebody recently told me that winter is long. I hope it’s a mild one.

Mary Bergman, originally from Provincetown, now lives on Nantucket. She is a writer and historian, working in historic preservation and writing a novel.