News and Events for Nantucket Island
I follow a boy to the beach. He pedals a brown 12-speed Univega with red panniers hanging off the rear rack, as if he were pedaling across the country and needed to bring everything he would ever need. The boy is bent over the racing handlebars, with his hands resting on the lower handles and his butt raised by a fraction of an inch off the seat. He wears a Campagnolo bicycling cap, although his bike has no rat traps for his feet nor is he wearing a helmet.
We have had a run of remarkable weather. May, on Nantucket, is no longer wedding season: brides don’t plan fun activities for guests in the raw rain and fog. But when the weather does break, the sky glows, the trees and bushes gobble up as much warmth as they can absorb, and God is in his heaven.
Photo by Allyson Bold
Summer often ends in a storm. One of the great whirling tempests of the Caribbean forms somewhere off the Azores and begins the slow dance across the warm Atlantic and around the Bermuda high. Those Who Know watch the glass and the Weather Channel to see how close and how far away the storm will pass. Then, when prudence and procrastination crash together at the boat ramp, summer gets towed away, shrink wrapped, and plopped onto a rack.
The Veranda House burned and nobody noticed.
Oh, we saw the pictures. We saw the plumes of smoke extending over the town, riding up, washing through the windmill and then out over the south shore. And we saw the pictures on social media and TV. However, the fire was an isolated event, much like the fireworks, the Pops, and Christmas Stroll. We hosted a news event that got our name onto local and national news. Any advertising is good advertising: My AirBnB views went through the roof.
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 […]
~ 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 […]
• by Robert Barsanti • On winter Sundays, I like to sit on a bench on Main Street. The weather rarely drives me inside or keeps my front door locked. The ocean has her gifts; one of her minor ones blows over the island and sends you to the sweaters […]
• by Robert P. Barsanti • The light remains in September. The air clears, the fog settles, and sky glows throughout the afternoon into an operatic sunset. To own a summer home on Nantucket is to also own the bankrupting irony of island living; the best weather comes after you […]
• by Robert P. Barsanti • She stood at Children’s Beach at six o’clock in the morning. The Eagle hummed with lights and activity, but otherwise the harbor was quiet and still. Four ducks paddled past the sailboats, and their wake, eventually, rolled up on the beach. The sun rose […]
