They brought the Oldest Member down to the beach after his nap. He didn’t want to go.
They were all there and he knew why.
The Oldest Member was turning 98 today. The number was absurd, as is any number over 75. His mother had had the consideration to give birth during the month of August, so that his family always had a good reason to visit when the water was warm, the surf was high, and tomatoes were plump. Had the great blessed stork visited her a few months earlier, and had he been born in March, he suspected that his birthday would not be quite so well attended.

Only one person used a cell phone.
Over Sconset, God sealed his covenant in cerulean blue. A light breeze shuffled the scrub oak leaves in Larsen Park and shifted the straw hat on a woman who had turned down a job offer because it began in August and she just couldn’t go right now.

She had been here a month.

From an Ivy League school, emerging from two years of pandemic college education, she stopped off on the back of the vegetable truck on Main Street. By this time in the morning, she was only selling zucchini, broccoli, and a few odd wildflowers. But it was a good day. She was wearing a tie-dye work shirt, white sneakers, and a big smile. “Everyone has been so…nice.”

“Do you want a piece of me?”

He did not look tasty.

He was well over seventy, bald, with a gray Van Dyke beard, a yellow Vineyard Vines shirt, and a visor. He was standing behind the hood of his white-and-gold Mercedes SUV. His wife had just backed into a Jeep and was ready to drive away until they saw me. I had started recording the two of them.

We went to the movies for the first time in a year or so. The superheroes were on the big screen, the sound shook the seats, and no one looked back at the explosions. In front of us, a string of teenagers needled each other and glanced at their phones. We were glad to be there, glad to be maskless, and glad that they were making popcorn again.

The backyard has grown in. When we first moved in, the backyard inched up to a stone wall, and then expanded into a low bushes and a marsh before it rose into paddocks and a ridge. The ridge, of course, sprouted houses sometime just after the turn of the millennium. The low brush, on the other hand, was once a place where I stood up the old Christmas tree so that the boys could see it through the spring and summer. Now, those bushes have grown to eight feet or so, and the houses on the ridge are hidden.

She parked her dented pickup in the loading zone for the Hy-Line. Then, she left it with her friend and her luggage. Her landscaper’s pickup truck, redolent of hydrangea and dirt, sat half in traffic, half in the loading zone while a row of cars built up behind her. The rest of us had luggage to drop off, people to bid farewell, and business to conduct. But we were stuck behind her.

Everything you need to know about Nantucket is in the classifieds. The stories may not stand up, grab you by the collar, and shout at you; but if you sit down next to them, hold their hand, and listen quietly, the truth will come out. Then, if you stand up, say thanks, and look around, you can see the world from where you stand.