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Mary Bergman

  • I’ve never thought of any beach before as my beach. Maybe that’s because all those other beaches already had names. I thought this beach was nameless, marked only by it’s “Emergency Beach Location 21” sign.
  • At the end of December, one of the Cape’s newspapers ran a special nostalgia issue. On the front page was Joel Meyerowitz’s iconic photograph of one of the Days Cottages on Beach Point in North Truro.
  • I was walking along Nantucket’s north shore, the calmer waters of Nantucket Sound stretching out nearly thirty miles to the mainland. In the summer, this part of the island is busy with people: dog walkers and joggers in the early hours, families swim in the shallows in the late afternoon.
  • Late Sunday afternoon — it isn’t all that late, but now that it’s dark at 4:30, late is all relative. Landmarks change in the winter light. The boarded-up Surfside snackbar where teenagers spent the summer scooping ice cream haunts the empty parking lot.
  • Nantucket Writer and Historian Mary revisits a place she wondered about as a child.
  • Right now, we are waiting to see what the impacts of Hurricane Lee will be. Caretakers are pulling boats out of the harbor, amateur forecasters weigh in on windspeed estimations.
  • Nantucket Writer and Historian Mary Bergman ponders Nantucket’s endless current.
  • A sailor got lost in the fog the other week while out on an evening cruise. His cell phone had slipped overboard, plunging into the drink. He’d no radar on the sixteen foot day sailer.
  • The other day, when the wind was coming out of the south, Becky and I set out for Coskata Woods. We left the car along the side of the road near the Trustees gatehouse, past the Wauwinet Hotel, one of the few remaining grand resorts built in the Victorian era, as Nantucket redefined itself as a summer destination.
  • I keep track of the lilac bushes on my way to work, tiny buds as tight as a fist start to slowly unfurl as the calendar turns to May. The peeper frogs have been at it for weeks now, their electric chorus ringing out in the night. Lengthening days are our reward for an endless winter.