by Robert P. Barsanti I stood in a kitchen in Tom Nevers and watched a phone ring. My life had skipped back twenty years while an aqua wall-phone was going through its famous paces. For a half second too long for my own comfort I wondered if someone’s pocket held […]
Nantucket Essays
June-uary
by Robert P. Barsanti June-uary has come upon us from the east. In this season, the visitors, the brides, and the bachelor parties race to the island with their daffodil swim suits, rent aqua bicycles, and head off to Cisco in cotton fog. When they arrive at the brewery, the […]
Last Islanders
by Robert P. Barsanti I woke up to dubstep. The Bulgarian Power Team who tend the realtor’s houses on our street had keyed up some Central European Trap Music to blast over the sound of the riding mowers and their earphones. They had pulled into one of the empty gravel […]
Box of Tears
by Robert P. Barsanti My son came back from April vacation with a date for prom. This fact rose up from the sea and flopped up onto the beach in front of me. I looked at this heaving thing and, as one does, accepted that this is what must be. […]
The Currency of Memories
by Robert P. Barsanti On a bright Saturday in early May, one of the young men and I bought a dress shirt at Murray’s. Sometime in the winter, or at some other time when I wasn’t looking, the men’s section of the old store had been rearranged. It hadn’t been […]
Spring Sweeps In
by Robert P. Barsanti My neighbors are selling their summer place for seven million dollars. The websites tell me that the mortgage on that will break down to a neat 29,000 dollars a month. The house has been improved over the last two years, down to the foundation. It now […]
Measuring Days by Cup & Teaspoon
~ by Robert P. Barsanti ~ Somehow, the years have given me a set of cookbooks. They could have given me trust funds, summer houses, or a graceful sense of rhythm for the mambo, but the old calendars gave those to someone else and left me their cookbooks. My mother […]
Season of the Stick
by Robert P. Barsanti The ocean chewed the dark. Miles from the beach, the crunching and biting hung in the immediate present, distinct and clear. Overhead, the calendar roared and the power lines hummed. My boon companion and I were checking the fortifications as we do each night. We look […]
The Silence of September
by Robert P. Barsanti The radio rolled out with Presidential shenanigans, a new iPhone in California, and an update on the latest hurricane before it muttered out the September “Beach and Boating Forecast” and the tides for the day. Then I shut it off. Instead of the radio and the […]