In the morning gleam as the tide went down

I am on Cape Cod for the day. I expect to spend it by the sea.

Last night before bed I read about half of Robert Arthur's Davy Jones' Haunted Locker: Great Ghost Stories of the Sea for Young People (1965), which I thought at first I had last seen in my elementary school library, but now believe that was actually one of his other ghost story anthologies: I would have remembered reading Arthur's "Jabez O'Brien and Davy Jones' Locker," Lord Dunsany's "One August in the Red Sea," or P. Schuyler Miller's "Ship-in-a-Bottle." I enjoyed seeing the prose of William Hope Hodgson's "The Stone Ship" after previously hearing it performed by the Post-Meridian Radio Players. I don't know where I read Frank Belknap Long's "Second Night Out" or Hodgson's "The Voice in the Night," but I recognized them as stories that had freaked the bejeezus out of me as a child. I had Garnet Rogers' setting of Charles Kingsley's "Three Fishers" stuck in my head all night.

Yesterday we made our traditional strawberry ice cream for the last time in the hand-cranked churn of my childhood; it literally had to be held together with duct tape for the purpose. We'll get another one for next year. A very nice assortment of people showed up to help churn and then devour the fruits of their labor, sometimes with blueberries and homemade strawberry syrup on top. I walked for hours with derspatchel in the Great Meadows of Arlington. We had no organized plan for seeing the fireworks, but managed to meet up with rushthatspeaks and gaudior at Prospect Hill. If this year was David Mugar's farewell, he went out with a shimmering bang. schreibergasse rang the bells with the rest of the band at the Church of the Advent for the 1812 Overture. And I accepted an offer from my father's friend who has a house on the Cape to stay the night and renew my acquaintance with the local Atlantic. Also with sunblock, but that's a hazard I accept.

Moon in the window like a bird on the pole

"I love your style," the woman said to me as I was eating a soft serve ice cream cone in the parking lot of Captain Frosty's. I had no idea what she was talking about. It was about six in the evening and still hot enough that I was losing a battle with the laws of thermodynamics, which were dripping chocolate and vanilla twist with chocolate dip all over my hand. "Barefoot—authentic Cape Cod." I hadn't thought about it: I hadn't put my shoes back on after walking for an hour or so on the beach because I couldn't remember the last time I had walked any distance barefoot and it had felt wonderful even after the beach ran out of sand and turned into sliding pebbles, three or four sea-tumbled examples of which I was actually carrying in one of my shoes (the fragile yellow flake of a jingle shell, so as to avoid crushing it, had gone into the other). I managed to say thank you anyway and went back to eating the chocolate dip very rapidly off the outside of the ice cream before the whole thing collapsed. My father's friend confirmed that when younger she used to run all over the Cape with no shoes on. Who knew it was now a fashion statement?

(I spent the afternoon on Corporation Beach. I don't know where the name came from; I don't know why the next beach over is named Cold Storage. The sky over the eastern end of the beach was so thunderously lowering when we got there that I wasn't sure if a storm was going to break. It was high tide, a narrow margin of sand between the dunes and the granite-shored houses, or the sandy slips of erosion where houses had been. The water was steel-grey except where it rolled over translucently onto the shore. Then the tide started to draw out, the clouds in the east broke up blue, the water came out in glassy blues and ledge-thinned greens under the sun, and by the time I put down a towel on dry sand with as much distance as I could get from the teenage sunbathers, I had not just taken off my coat but was actively regretting the existence of sleeves on my T-shirt. I read another quarter of Barbara Hambly's Die Upon a Kiss (2001) and fell asleep. I remember thinking that the sand smelled different from Crescent Beach on Cape Elizabeth in Maine. There were rocks and shining sand uncovered by the time I woke. Dinner was a lobster roll and lemonade from the DPM Surfside Grill. The seabird that went overhead with a fish in its claws—I thought at the time it was a gull, but usually I see them carrying crabs in their bills—looked exactly like a plane on a bombing run.)

After dinner, I walked for another hour and change around the neighborhood where my father's friend lives. I saw two adult turkeys with a baker's dozen of turkey chicks picking their way across a lawn. I saw four crows on the telephone wires; two of them cawed at me, two were silent, and one flew away as I passed. (They reminded me that I still need to see Maleficent (2014), which I hope surprises no one who knows how I feel about shape-changers.) I heard a slightly amplified tenor voice and an acoustic guitar echoing out of a garage, though the only person I could see as I walked past was a young man opening a beer. I met one jogger with an iPod and one without, one golden retriever and their person, several cars with whom I did not interact. A bird whose species I could not identify which shrilled at me with increasing aggression as I walked underneath the pine tree with a nest in its branches. It makes a difference to me, if I can get out of the house, if I can spend more than an hour not just not sitting at my computer, but actively walking. In some ways I think better in motion. The soles of my feet still sting slightly, but I seem to have avoided blisters; I think I took a little sun across the cheekbones and the bridge of my nose, but that's where it usually lands with me. I cannot be happy with my body right now, but at least parts of it feel more normal with exercise. And ocean. My hair is full of salt. Everything here smells like the sea.