Mary Bergman

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.

I hadn’t been out to the South Shore since last December, when weeks of high wind revealed the bones of an ancient shipwreck.

We drive down Hummock Pond Road, where a concrete Jersey barrier marks the end of the asphalt and the beginning of the sea. It’s a shorter drive from town than all the way out to Madaket, and besides, there isn’t really a parking lot at Madaket Beach anymore, the erosion has taken big bites out of the pavement.

February 10th marked the 25th anniversary of the great fire at Whaler’s Wharf in Provincetown.

In the winter, my island world, small to begin with, shrinks considerably. I’ve worn a path down Surfside Road, between town and home.

A few weekends ago, word got out that there was a shipwreck down on the South Shore. A man walking had posted a photo online, a few slanting poles in the sand the only indicator of exactly where on Nantucket’s 80 miles of coastline this shipwreck sat.

The other week, I spent a few days with my five-year-old nephew and his parents in Truro. It was a trip we’d looked forward to all summer.

Last Friday afternoon, when I should have been at work, I went scalloping. Six days of rain had finally relented, giving way to a bluebird sky. It didn’t take much convincing on my part.

September is summer dialed down a notch. By the time you hear this, we will be just a day away from autumn. But if you are like me, you coax summer to stay as long as you can.