Nantucket Essays

Arlington Cemetery
Nantucket Essays

Remembering Who Earned This

• by Robert P. Barsanti • This year, Boxed Water is the new thing.  On Sunday morning, the beautiful ones drifted down to the ferries wearing Vineyard Vines, loafers, sunglasses, and carrying white and black boxes of Boxed Water.  They swirled it, sipped it, set it back on the tables, […]

Nantucket Fog
Nantucket Essays

Patterns in the Fog

by Robert P. Barsanti One of the pleasures of attending a baseball game at Nantucket High School comes from watching the sea fog slowly creep down the harbor. From the sunny comforts of the first base stands, the runner takes his lead off first, the right fielder looks in for […]

Nantucket Essay
Nantucket Essays

Yards of Spring

• by Robert P. Barsanti • Winter leaves like a tenant. One morning you wake up, and he is gone. The trash remains, as well as the broken windows, punch holes in the walls, and a plumbing challenge in the upstairs bathroom. The miscreants themselves have slipped away at dawn […]

Winter on Nantucket | Nantucket | MA
Nantucket Essays

Nantucket Winters

•  by Robert P. Barsanti • On Friday at four, A contractor and I stood on the rear deck of the Gray Lady Two as it popped into its high gear, sprouted a rooster tail, and zipped over the swells. The long swells marched slowly in from the northeast. We […]

Nantucket Whalers
Nantucket Essays, Nantucket History & People

Whalers Then & Now

• by Robert P. Barsanti • When the mighty Nantucket Whalers scored their first touchdown of the game, I was sitting at the fifty yard line discussing computer software. We paused in our discussion and watched the Upper Cape Voke tacklers bounce off of the running back until he stood […]

Nantucket Essays

September Bride

• by Robert P. Barsanti • The wedding party was leaving. On Friday, they had fallen out of the catalogs and arrived at the back bar on the Gray Lady II. Then, over the course of the weekend, they drifted from church to beach to “Where-O-Where House” to Chicken Box […]

Nantucket Essays

Getting Paid in “Happy”

• by Robert P. Barsanti • In the new millennium, we start the school year before Labor Day.  The state wants 180 days, the lawyers want us to watch the disclaimers, and everyone wants to be done before the beginning of July. So, before the sales begin, we trudge off […]

"Perseid meteor and Milky Way in 2009" by Brocken Inaglory - Own work. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0 via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Perseid_meteor_and_Milky_Way_in_2009.jpg#mediaviewer/File:Perseid_meteor_and_Milky_Way_in_2009.jpg
Nantucket Essays

Stars of August

• by Robert P. Barsanti • I missed the meteors this week. In other years, we have driven out to dark beaches and watched the lights streak across the great dome of stars. Not this year. This year the statistics of daily life with doctor’s appointments and ferry runs overwhelmed […]

Nantucket Essays

Different, Not Less

He is no longer a boy. His beard comes in thick and red, as if Finn McCool were to come back up those Irish rocks and sit with us at the Papa Gino’s. He has grown taller than his parents and has grown stronger than both. When he bounces off […]