A Cape Cod Notebook

The lilacs have come and gone, the American pillar roses out in ’Sconset, on the island’s eastern end, are just about to bloom. I’ve been canceling plans to go hang out with the horseshoe crabs, who troll Nantucket’s north shore under the early summer’s full and new moons.

About a month ago, just after the oak leaves had come fully out, I was walking out our drive to get the mail when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw the gray form of a squirrel to my left, rustling around in last year’s leaves next to the wood pile.

Over the past several months, I’ve introduced several of our friends to an extraordinary property recently acquired by the Wellfleet Conservation Trust.

I do not understand the brilliance of the bright full moon in the sky tonight, though I stand beneath it on the beach. I have had its phases explained to me, but I do not fully grasp them.

A Yarmouth friend was recently worried about her aging grandmother.It’s hard, she said, she lives so far away.

I have, unwittingly, become instantly identifiable by my red knit cap. I have been wearing the cap each winter for more than a decade, and on days when I wear something else, I am invisible.

On the last day of April, a few minutes before 8 a.m., I stood in line in a chilly, light drizzle, waiting for the opening of Wellfleet’s most recent home-grown or home-made food purveyor, The Bagel Hound.

A lot of trees came down this winter, largely the result of two fierce windstorms in January. Most were pitch pines.

April is indeed the cruelest month – and it’s not just because Cape Cod weather whipsaws us into madness, with 65 degrees one day and 40 the next.

I keep having dreams where I am standing in the School Street parking lot. There is nothing particularly special, certainly nothing beautiful, about the parking lot, located between Mechanic and School Streets in Provincetown.