Returning to Provincetown

Some years ago I spent eight months living here, on this spit of curved land in the ocean. At that time, I began the book I am now finishing.

I want to afford the luxury of nostalgia.

I remember sitting on the harbor beach just after nightfall looking at an enormous orange globe perched at the horizon, wondering, disoriented, until I realized it was a moon.

I remember a bog in the beech forest, a tangle of branches stuck in ice, the thought of ice skating but not doing it. The skullcap white sky of winter. No birds. An absence, a silence so deep it gave me goose bumps. I was a city girl and nothing in nature had ever gotten to me like that before. It’s still in me, that frozen winter bog.

Before Provincetown I wasn’t a person who could get chills from a frozen bog or could be shocked by a harvest moon. But there is something about the salted air, the clanging buoys, the rocks grown soft green hair. If there is anything like magic in the world, some portion of it is grown here.