Tag Archives: Cape Cod

January 10, 2023 · 8:29 pm

Ode to a Pen

By Kimberly Mayer

New Years can be daunting, but this year I was fortunate to have David Whyte’s poem, Start Close In, in my head.

Start close in, 

don’t take

the second step

or the third,

start with the first

thing

close in….

Looking at my hand, I knew, that would have to be my pen. And so in my head I started to compose a homage to pens.

A writer’s needs are really very simple: a pen and paper, chair and table. My loyalty in pens goes back a number of years when in every trip to Costco, I’d pick up a packet of Uni-ball Signo 207 gel ink rollerball pens and toss it in the cart. It’s hard to believe anyone would use so much ink, but I do. Black ink. 

The Uni-ball Signo was bold and smooth, with a textured grip. If I had any complaint, its rolling ball tip had difficulty going from a left- handed person to a right-handed person, and back again, or vice versa. Being a lefty, I had to stash my pens from my right-handed husband.

Then, when asked for my signature on something in California, I fell in love with the pen provided. It looked innocuous, bland, but it felt like second nature—almost like it wasn’t even there. Soft and comfortable all over, if your hand happens to turn and walk up and down the pen, while “thinking,” as mine does. The name on the pen was obscure, TRU RED 0.7, and because I imagined it might be hard to find, I snitched it.

Turned out to be 1, 2, 3, easy on Google. A Staples pen, and the next thing you know, a dozen of them in a box at my door. Amazon. Uni-ball or TRU, I’m fine either way, but all this is to say I am working my way to my father’s Mont Blanc pen, which I left at home. I had convinced him to purchase it on an overseas flight years ago, assuring him it would be worth it.

We both aspired to be writers at the time. Dad wrote a memoir during his retirement on Cape Cod, and inspired me to write mine. With a book he never intended to sell, only gift, dad went the self-publishing route. Numerous boxes of One Man’s Journey slowly dwindled in his garage. Not too many years earlier, the same garage contained stockpiles of children’s books, collected on The Cape. These he shipped in a container to schools in Nepal, following his trek in the Himalayas at 62 years of age.

Yet another life-changing example of someone having climbed the Himalayas. My husband too came down his first mountain in the Himalayas, and has been committed to public service ever since, from meals for children on island at home to computers for schools in Honduras.

Dad is gone now, but I have his pen. Heavier, larger, and more rotund, the last words the pen wrote were his. When I get home I am going to fill his Mont Blanc with black ink and make it my every day pen. Using his pen will be like holding his hand. 

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July 7, 2020 · 8:40 pm

The Nest

BY KIMBERLY MAYER

A hanging fuchsia basket recently sold at Julie’s Nursery on San Juan Island and was promptly returned when the customer found a nest in it at home. The nest was built in a hollow at soil level and contained three little eggs. Julia exchanged the basket, and hung this one where it had been hoping the mother bird would not abandon it.

“Sure enough,” exclaimed Julia, “soon there were four eggs!”

Four eggs, it turns out, is the normal clutch of eggs for a Junco, who usually lay one egg per day. Thanks to swift observation on the part of the customer, the clutch is now complete and Julia watches over the nest in her nursery today.

My childbearing years are behind me, but I will always equate nests with homes.

Once I lived in a perfectly beautiful house in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. How we got there I haven’t a clue, for we deeply loved the town in California we had to leave for Bryn Mawr, and were as happy, settled, and committed as we had ever been, anywhere. Then the next thing you know we left this perfect house because my husband’s job was moving us west again, this time to Seattle.

It was at this point that a friend of mine gave me Louise Gluck’s poem “The Nest,” torn from the pages of The New Yorker. I carried that poem with me. It worked its way into my very being. “The Nest” spoke to me so much it was as if I had written it. In the end, that poem was a springboard or prompt for a memoir I wrote. A memoir that has everything to do with nature, homes, and moving.

 

A bird was making its nest.

In the dream I watched it closely.

 

I mention this because my youngest sister in Boston is looking to move. No one’s job is requiring it, for they both work remotely. They just want to find a place where they might like to retire. Which is what we did on San Juan Island from Seattle, and now I can say I live in a perfect place. And having written a manuscript about new starts, I am trying to help her with this.

 

It had it’s task:

To imagine the future.

 

So how is it happening that I am falling in love with Cape Cod? I’m smelling salt air, suntan oil, seaweed, and lobster, all swirled into one. It’s knowing that all those barns on 6A are filled to the rafters with antiques, a browser’s paradise year after year. And all the writers and poets and artists who migrate to Provincetown. Perhaps the grass really is greener… Afterall, Annie Dillard moved from Lummi Island, Washington to the Outer Cod.

 

I had nothing to build with.

It was winter: I couldn’t imagine

Anything but the past. I couldn’t even

Imagine the past, if it came to that.

 

This is exactly what gets me every time: this desire to change my life. I think, what am I doing here when I could be there? Or there? Or there? Sometimes it scares me. And it should really scare my brother-in-law because before we knew it, our other sister was seeing herself on Cape Cod as well. The three of us residing in a community of small shingled cottages just steps from the beach and just steps from each other.

We had it all worked out, aging together. Our younger sister would get a foothold in the first cottage, and let us know as other cottages become available. We’d start our own book group there, opening it to others as we met them. We’d help each other out with guest rooms when one was experiencing an overflow of guests. In time, we would come to be known as “the older sisters” in our new seaside town.

 

And I didn’t know how I came here.

Everyone else much further along.

I was back at the beginning

At a time in life we can’t remember beginnings.

 

What our husbands were going to do, I don’t know. Fish?

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March 8, 2016 · 7:13 pm

Walking in the World

White Point sign

BY KIMBERLY MAYER

There are people in our lives who have an influence they’d never know. My parents instilled a love for Cape Cod that we find in many ways living here on San Juan Island in Washington. The friend in California who suggested a year or so ago that I rein in this blog to a remodeling theme: remodeling a house, remodeling a life—the same thing, in my book. Our daughter, now living in Argentina, who upon visiting before her departure grew my daily walk by a beautiful mile or two. And in sending me a video of the works of sculptor Anthony Howe on neighboring Orcas Island, my cousin in Atlanta reminding me to stay with art every day. And to try not to stray.

They are all part and parcel of who I am, why I’m here, and how I see it.

“Walking the loop” began as a tradition while living on upper Queen Anne in Seattle and continues out here today. That first loop took me around the perimeter of the hill, overlooking the Space Needle and downtown Seattle, Lake Union, and Puget Sound. Today’s loop takes me alongside Westcott Bay, and through the red, white and blue nostalgic quality of Roche Harbor Resort where everyone looks good in the light. Finally, the road meanders through an old growth forest of cedar, fir, and pine where everything grows dark and green, and back to my home on the bay.

Where the road dips down to the shoreline I experience what I call a Cape Cod moment, framed by flatlands, grasses, marshes, and horizon. In the course of this walk I may pass only one or two cars on the road, a few more in summer, on an island where every driver waves.

This is the walk my daughter grew, taking it out on a point to new terrain, the posh end of White Point Road. Here I pass tennis courts where nobody’s playing, a pond with a dock establishing someone’s swimming hole, and a private golf course back in there somewhere, for I’ve seen it from the water. Horse fencing and regally high pampas grasses standing like sentry guide the way. Crushed white shells underfoot line the one-lane road at sea level. It’s as private as private can be, except for me, out on this point.

Here I gape at houses, something that seems to be my lot in life: the desire to see myself in other spaces, other places. On walks I finish unfinished houses in my mind, or tear them down and start again. As anyone in the field knows, design is never done. When the bones are good, I may mentally repaint it, or envision it clad in cedar shingles, dark, red, natural or a weathered gray.

At home, the short video on the kinetic sculpture of Anthony Howe awaits me. It’s mesmerizing. How did my cousin know to send this now? I needed it. Isn’t art what ultimately pulls us through? All the arts, always. And art as balm, particularly in troubling times. Which is where we are today.

“After reading the newspaper on Sunday, I sit quietly and simply look at art books.” Michael Graves

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December 19, 2014 · 8:18 pm

A DIY Christmas

Tree Bird

 

Christmas is doing itself this year. I have surrendered to the environment.

Several powerful windstorms have come to visit us in our first winter on San Juan Island. Days as dark as night. Pinecones pelting windowpanes like sleet. Downed branches and trees crisscrossing roads and paths. And that incessant hum…

I have trouble falling asleep with the winds. And then I don’t know where I am when I awaken.

I am learning that living on the water is much like living on a boat. At high tide our concern is that the bank will hold. At low tide we breathe a sigh of relief—that is when we fall asleep, I think. In my dreams we’ve been swept away, much the way I feel when anchoring for the night.

“The florist delivered again!” I exclaim, as I throw open the front door in the morning. Each day after a windstorm I find fresh branches at my doorstep, from which I cut boughs to freshen our mantle, tuck onto gifts, and make arrangements with greens, pinecones and winterberries.

All the roads are softly covered in cedar and pine needles after a windstorm, as soft and quiet as a snowfall. At our front door a foyer rug of navy, salmons and green is perfect for hiding the needles coming in on every boot. Who knew?

The rug was a gift from my parents. Windstorms whistled when they lived on Cape Cod. When the wind whistled everyone wanted to come downstairs to sleep.

Interesting, a whistling there. A deep, low humming here.

Back to Christmas.

We cut down our own little tree on our property. In the house it speaks to me, telling me what it wants.

“Forget the totes full of Victorian and Venetian glass ornaments you collected over the years,” it says. Suddenly all of that is an heirloom.

“What I am is a woodland tree.”

I knew that.

Rummaging through my totes for birds, pinecones, vines and icicles, I found a few. It doesn’t get on my tree now unless it comes from the forest.

The beauty of the woodland tree is in the minimalism. It speaks of the scarcity of winter.

(note to self: don’t go overboard collecting these ornaments either).

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