Winter on the Cape

Our wanderings were reminiscent of those old grey-blue, creaking, and salt stained, boards, that lived along the shoreline on the cape. They covered nearly every building draped in siding hand forged from the same hands who cut them a long time ago, longer than either of us were alive to know, and they survived their makers as well.

The sea air softened everything it touched. The biting chill would slip in almost unnoticed and grow so cold so suddenly, it was almost more likened to a sort of burning with no fire. The sea air and cutting salt made it all worse, but even in the warm season this was a place for adults. No laughter, no innocence, just slow groaning wood, ice, snow, and a wind that felt as though it could reach out and slap you, and the background noises of random people, hard worked into an early-old, conversing in the distance in tune to the crying of the gulls, begging for handouts from the labors of the Atlantic.

It was the kind of place that held the essence of a hovering maturity, even if “maturity” meant being perpetually soused, at some ancient corner bar where Cole Porter was still playing on the juke-box, but sung way too loud, off-key, and in the strangest accent I’d ever heard. All of our wanderings always ended as bizarre and somehow other worldly.

Every now and again, those odd phonetics would crawl out of your mouth as though an earthworm were ominously searching the air for birds, forgetting itself, and suddenly crawling right back in again, like crows eyes had spotted it. The accent embarrassed you, like my mothers too, did her. You both hated the sound of the places you had in common, the places that made you. I thought it was strange, certainly not as exotic as the German or Russian you spoke. My mothers tongue, your grandfathers vernacular all mixed in with the non-rhotic half way mark, softened slightly somewhere in between Boston and New York. It was amusing to me when I would hear it rise up from you, and how fast you were to reign in back in again. Cough, throat cleared, and thereby excused, changed to something closer to proper English. "As it should be" you would say. Funny how my mother was the same. It was an accent you felt sounded crass, and off-putting, and with time, I too learned how to curb my own New York.

And as we wandered the bare, and out of season streets; The acrid sand and biting chill would enter your bones and rummage around inside of you, sip your warm blood like a leach, and wipe its dripping nose on anything within you that time had upholstered with that memory pattern; like the hideous sofa’s we had as kids. The season of the 60’s. In our case, it was a cacophony of hideous autumn. Browns, and oranges that hid all of life’s nastiest stains, to serve as an epitaph to all the messy things you couldn’t always get out once they set in. Everything bad, and unpleasant was camouflaged, and hidden in the patterns we used to wipe our souls clean. This was the perfect place we came to do this, Recharge, "Something about the salt in the air." you would say. "It cleans everything."

And so the buildings on the island were a salt soaked oceanic grey. Striated black, and brown, boxed, immovable and upright with a menstrual sort of rust; that matched the somber, cold tone of a winter sky. Like Joyce’s “ Sea-foam snot-green.” Which coincidentally were the in-colors at the time. Southwestern, they called it. Everywhere else but North East.

With a Jett black pea coat that enveloped you like the deep aching hug of an old sailor, and large black buttons like terrified eyes, your thin legs burned from the cold. In torn blue jeans and old black boots, is how I loved you best. Hands shoved deep into your pockets, holding your insides in, sheltering them from the ebbing blue-veined, and tongue-stuck stainless steel weather. Nothing was ever quite as cold.

Your giant-steps- gait, to my eternally trailing behind you, in strides of: red light, green light, I , 2, 3. It took me three, to every one of yours just to keep at pace with you. Maneuvering through against a biting wind. It exhausted me once you really got going, and raced through the tiny knives your breath would make, like a white heat flame-thrower, with a Bright red nose. But when we were through, the sudden change from frigid to warm, was pleasing, and cozy by the snapping hiss, of a defiant fire built with care in the hearth.

I loved peeling the weather from you. Like snow suits and wet heavy gloves for pit stops on hot radiators, I’d peel you like a strange exotic fruit, and warm you up in our deep and soapy lovers soup. the only way to heat your bones, and get you clean. Was to take you home to thaw like a frozen bumble-bee tied to a string, tied to my pinky-swear, that said, without saying, that :I would love you until the end of time.

...For Always, and always.”

A wish that failed us, but yet kept safe within a statement of truth that is still moving forward without you, like you and I still darting through December on the cape to race that sudden bitter cold back to warm.

Me, always lagging behind you, and trying to catch up.

You would challenge the day, standing brave at the shoreline, defiant in the frigid spray, holding your ground on the ancient black rocks that met the Pilgrims, as you stood in back of me pulling me deeply into the dark embrace of your night sky coat, with the forward press of your intentions pulling me in toward them, like a toreador, my Talos, standing on the rocks protecting me from harm with stinging cheeks like an old white lighthouse, aged before your time but still beautiful. Still a beacon burning brightly, guiding me back toward everything I have ever loved.