The youngest and I went off-island to take a driver’s test. Nature might be healing from Covid but it takes the Registry of Motor Vehicles a little longer to get back to up to speed than the rest of us do. The brewers were up faster than the restaurants, the restaurants before the health clubs, and the Registry comes dawdling at the end of the line. So, the office in the town building remains shortstaffed, and Registry business either comes zapping over the wires or steaming across the water. So we steamed. 

We have had a run of beach days. A puddle of relatively cool and dry air has sat over New England and spilled out over the Atlantic to about a hundred miles south of the island. Sitting on the shore, the southern press of clouds massed and slid by on the southern horizon. The island lucked into a cool pocket, under light northern winds, through the end of the week and the weekend. 

One recent morning, the good fishermen of Madaket woke up to a Land Rover Discovery. It was discovered off the end of the Jackson Point Ramp, in eight feet of the North Atlantic. The owner described it as stolen. And sunk.

On a June evening full of weddings, we drove out to the Sconset Market for an ice cream. The fog remains ascendent in Siasconset, wrapping the homes, the hedge and the trees in winter’s packing. While town was lit with rehearsal dinners and bachelor parties, Sconset slumbered still.

Main Street has many comfortable seats on a Sunday morning. The dramas and excitement of Saturday night have washed or rolled down the cobbles, and Sunday morning comes gleaming up the harbor. It dapples the bricks through the elms, reflects off the gallery windows, and lights up my coffee cup. The air is cool and clear, the traffic light, and the parade interesting. 

The traffic doesn’t come in and out of the elementary school as it used to. Parents are spending an extra moment or two with the kids, hoping that they remember how to smear blood on themselves and play dead if the moment occurs. The building has so many doors, so many windows, and hasn’t become the hard target that all of the good schools aspire to be these days.

Not all that long ago, when I believed that my parents would be hosting the holidays for the next few years at least, a question was pressed into my chest. “So,” my uncle asked. “What is it like on Nantucket in the winter.”

Like anyone who has one foot on island and one foot on shore, I had developed a series of responses to this question. Always aware of an opportunity to be an embarrassment and an outrage to my father, I had several samples of island life ready to present.