essay by Robert P. Barsanti
In winter, the island returns to Main Street. During the warmer months, we avoid Main Street: too much traffic, too much chaos, and too few reasons to be downtown. The Hub no longer saves the Sunday papers in their cubby holes, there’s no wing night at the long gone AC, and Hardy’s has disappeared and taken Bingo the parrot with it. Almost everything we could want, from glazed donuts to step ladders to Mom’s prescriptions could be found near empty parking places, away from the confusion, chaos, and cobblestones.
But in the winter, downtown sidewalks offer a place to be. The buildings offer a windbreak most days, the sun is out, and you can still get a cup of coffee until the light dims, the temperature dips, and the bar at the Brotherhood becomes a favorite retreat from the weather.
Over the buildings, over the scratching fingers of the elms, over the spires, glows the faded brightness of a winter sky. To the east, beyond the harbor and the Wauwinet, winter clouds build. During the course of the afternoon, the outriders come slipping to the west, followed by the cavalry, and infantry until the sky musters in regiments of purple clouds.
In winter, most Main Street stores are closed. Most of the restaurants are dark. The parking places have opened up and no gentle soul is trying to negotiate the bricks and stones in high heels. Main Street remains the gathering spot, be it to browse the bookstores, look at the water, or people-watch.
The island returns to the islanders at Halloween. The sawhorses come out and the road closes to cars. Then it opens to children. Their costumes may have been out of a box, out of a closet, or out of the magic in someone’s fingers. We walk around and recognize each other after a long summer amid the Platinum Circle Members and their Valued Guests. Our costumes show us off: a good costume reveals more than it hides. One family dresses up as Tetris blocks, another as Mario, Luigi, and Princess Peach, another as four witches and death. And the babies. And the dogs. We wander and wonder and smile. Then, November begins and the scallopers dock in the Boat Basin slips that the Hinckleys and Herschoffs abandoned weeks before.
Just before Thanksgiving, the D.P.W. lines the streets with Christmas trees. The schools, the day care centers, and the clubs get out the glue sticks, the glitter, and the laminators. Assigned a tree, these groups endeavor to put little hands to work in creating glue gun leaves and scallop shell history.
No one is looking to buy a first grader’s ornament as a souvenir of their Nantucket Stroll—we aren’t decorating for the money. Instead, we want the ornaments to complete our collection: Wee Whalers to Fifth Grade. When my boys were smaller and frosted with wonder, a walk downtown was aimed at finding our family heirloom hanging on a tree in front of the toggery store or the drugstore. Later, when strollers have gone back home and windows are papered with 50% off signs, we will recover the scallop shell or the self portrait, bring it home, and hang it on our own tree. It’s a leaf we won’t let fall.
We hang it again and again, through college and career and weddings and children and all the dark times, year after year, until there is a box of ornaments to be passed down. The value remains—the scallop shell Santa holds the moment, the story, and Main Street memories inside it.
The mother and I have all the boy’s ornaments. They remain in the sentimental lockbox that holds baby clothes, varsity letters, and Christmas ornaments. To walk up Main Street at Christmas, or shortly after, is to see that next layer of memories, of stories, build up in the hearts and mouths of islanders, like leaves on the trees. We change, but the street doesn’t.
The stores change: no longer can you rent videos or print photos downtown. The clothes, the coffee, and the climate has changed. We have cut down one generation of elms and replaced them with the next generation. But the street remains, paved in stone and framed with sidewalks of brick. It remains not just because of laws and rock, but custom. We need a place to be, even if there is no reason to be there. We need a place for us to be pulled back together, out of the job sites, and beaches, and homes. It pulls us back, in the lee of the wind and in the shadow of the winter sun: we all walk, we all look, and we remember what we have been, what we will be, and what remains.
On Christmas Eve, we return. We bring the tickets, and the kids, and a little something to keep us warm in case the wind picks up. They call the numbers that we never win (but we know that woman: she’s nice. I’m so glad that she won…”) We aren’t there for the money. We gather there to take attendance and to be counted. We also remain.