It rained lightly today. And tonight, as I walked the beagle, the streets were empty for the first time in months. It was an exquisite summer here in Provincetown – suddenly new and hazily old friends, bear-buddies on East End porches, lightly stoned gatherings on the beach, beagle-walks at low tide halfway across the harbor, polka-dot drag-queens trundling around on motor scooters, conversations begun by chance and continuing for days, the boyfriend and I actually having days together when we didn’t have to work or even worry about working. It was the same as years gone by but more poignant. Turning forty in a place where you turned thirty, retreading steps in solitude, watching the moon rise again and again across the bay: these things, like old jokes, somehow improve with repetition and time. I’m so lucky to have this little escape-hatch of a town, and the wildernesses that surround it. I realized one day at Long Point at the tip of Cape Cod that this is where I want my ashes to be spread – across the dunes into the ocean. I want one day to be an actual physical part of the earth and sea and air here, to experience these summer afternoons as dust and silt for an eternity. Politics can seem so strange from such a distance. But it continues, of course. And the light moves. And we drag ourselves reluctantly into fall.
The Dish 