Simple Pleasures

     B and I are vacationing on Cape Cod for two weeks. We're renting the same house we rented last year. We're here by ourselves right now, but soon some family will be visiting us.

A portrait of the harbor

     B and I have been coming to Cape Cod ever since we met, about 15 years ago. By that time she had already been to the Cape a few times with her kids. On my part, I first came here when I was in college, and have been coming back almost every year ever since.

     We like the salt air, the picturesque towns, the shoreline on Nantucket Sound, and farther out, the more rugged beaches along the Atlantic Ocean. And, not incidentally, our favorite ice-cream shop just happens to be right around the corner from our house. And a half mile the other way is George's Fish Market. We had steamed lobsters for dinner last night.

My crib sheet

     We've read a few books. I reviewed the signal flags that I learned last year. And as we rode our bikes past the local Congregational church, B told me the difference between a graveyard and a cemetery. A graveyard is located at a church; a cemetery is not.

     A few people actually live out here year round. We have friends, originally from the Boston area, who have lived in Falmouth for over 25 years. They raised their two kids here.

Graveyard at Harwich church

     But most of the crowds on the Cape consist of vacationers -- some families and a lot of retirees. In some ways, it's a fairly insular group. Almost all of them come from the Northeast. Actually, almost all of them come from Massachusetts. There are some people from Connecticut, and then there's a smattering of outliers from Maine to Maryland, from Ontario to Ohio. I saw one California license plate -- I bet those people grew up in Boston.

     There's also a contingent of retirees from Florida. (Most of them are originally from New England as well.) They spend summers here, but make sure to maintain their residency in Florida to avoid the heavy Massachusetts taxes. So you see a lot of Florida license plates dotting the landscape.

We went swimming in Seymour pond

     Honestly, the weather hasn't been that sunny (hence, the reading). We spent an hour the other night standing out in the rain waiting for a local baseball game to begin. It never did.

     But one afternoon we did go swimming in one of the kettle ponds, the bodies of water left behind by the glaciers some 18,000 years ago. We also rode the Shining Path bike trail from Falmouth to Woods Hole. We saw a summer stock production of Altar Boyz, which was a hoot. And a performance by Hyannis Sound, a college a cappella group that sings its way around the Cape for the summer.

Looking across to Martha's Vineyard

     None of this is very sophisticated. One of B's nephews, a high-school principal from New Jersey, is coming to visit for a couple of days. He and his wife just got back from Paris. I doubt we'll measure up.

     But we like the simple pleasures -- hanging around in shorts and t-shirts, slurping clam chowder and licking ice-cream cones, riding bikes and playing in the sand.