How do you explain what the heart feels, and the mind cries to understand ?
It’s early September, shadows growing longer, darker, sooner stretching, inching across my little peninsula making the cold Atlantic Ocean that surrounds me, and the land starts to take over the steel gray of winter. And at its very tip, this brief stretch of land is a mere 1.6 square miles. However, according to the United States Census, the town has a total area of 8.3 miles of which only 2.0 square miles are land and 6.3 miles of it (76.02%) is water. I suppose one could take that to mean that we are already 76.02 percent Atlantis. But according to the town government, Winthrop has a land area of just 1.6 miles and not 2.0, I don’t think the town means to belittle it’s self with that information. But we have cut our selves four-tenths of a mile short. It probably has to do with taxes. But if I were to figure the rate that sea level is raising I wonder how many years we have left. Never mind, I’d rather be surprised.
The town stretches itself out toward the Harbor Island as if trying to break free of the small amount of land that holds it to the shore. Technically, at high tide, we are an island, as there are only two, two-lane roads in and out. One way leads over a bridge the other through a marsh. I guess that’s why some folks get a bit jumpy when there’s a storm on the way. Today we wait for a hurricane. We don’t get many but when we do we have learned, I hope, to batten down the garbage cans. I think this scoach of land yearns to be an island, straining, pushing, and moaning against the land that holds it a prisoner. Wanting to be where there are no sea walls, no barriers of rocks to protect it from the sea, it was meant to be a part of the ocean, an Island. And now its earth remembers that, remembers that ships are safe in harbors, but ships were not meant to be in harbors, this small bit of land stretching one long thin arm outward toward the many islands that dot and lead the way toward the horizon.
You can already feel the movement of this small seacoast town as it starts to snuggle in for the months ahead. Shadows get a little longer every day. As the sun inches, its way lower in the sky minute by minute creeping like a small frighten animal crouching behind a wall at evening to make room for larger animals. The sailing ships that bring a multitude of colored sails to the harbor are suddenly fewer, as if they too left with the setting sun.
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