A Cape Cod Notebook

Twice a week, the Family Table Collaborative's donated food truck pulls into Cape Cod parking lots, offering meals to anyone who shows up, no questions asked. What began as a pandemic stopgap has grown into a weekly lifeline serving up to 700 people, built almost entirely on volunteer labor and local generosity.

New fishing restrictions on Nantucket extend protections for great white sharks that began on Cape Cod Bay and the Outer Cape. Tom Moroney connects those rules to the lasting damage Jaws did to the species' reputation, and to his own past coverage of a now-defunct shark tournament on the Vineyard.

A tiny, weathered gravestone in Sandwich's Old Burial Ground may be the oldest on Cape Cod, but its inscription was deliberately chiseled away centuries ago. Gravestone historian Steve Broker explains the competing theories, from anti-Quaker sentiment to Puritan objections over sacred imagery.

On Nantucket, the height of summer means being outnumbered by tourists two to one. A meditation on Augustitus, the exhaustion and thrill of a place at its busiest, borrowed from a phrase coined nearly a century ago.

A pizza order gone slightly sideways sends Tom Moroney down a rabbit hole of restaurant surcharges, tip-shaming, and the economics behind why your cheeseburger costs what it costs.

Painting a boathouse turns out to have a lot in common with yoga: stretching, balance, and the patience of proper prep work. A meditation on ladders, primer, and the quiet satisfaction of a job done right.

Turns out empty nest syndrome doesn't require actual children. Susan Moeller follows a gray catbird family that set up shop in the viburnum by the kitchen window, from sloppy first nest to turquoise eggs to a six hour screaming fit from an anxious dad. Then, silence. And a lot of feelings about it.

Nantucket wakes most summer mornings wrapped in fog, yet the island is deep in drought. With a sole-source aquifer and no neighboring town to lean on, water restrictions have divided the island between lawns left to go golden and lawns kept impossibly green by private wells. A meditation on scarcity, privilege, and the strange beauty of a place learning to live with less water.

From "Happy as a Clam" to "Squeezed Inn," a Cape Cod cottage-naming saga full of bad puns, a 92-year-old sign-maker's wisdom, and the realization that some things resist a name.

This week Robert Finch tells us why there is nothing more soothing than the sound of rain.