Cloistered in Cape Cod

The first vacation I ever took alone was to Cape Cod. Before that, I’d been to Florida with my family, spent six months volunteering in Jamaica, traveled to New York with the boyfriend I met while volunteering, and visited Panama with a different boyfriend and his parents.

Each of those trips was me, mediated. My longing to scour Orlando outlet malls butting up against my Dad’s desire to stake out front-row seats for Epcot Center fireworks. My love for cities chafing against my rural West Indian surroundings (I lived in Siloah, Jamaica: population 2653). And my attraction to poolside lounge chairs balanced against my then-boyfriend’s desire to rise with the sun for jungle hikes.

But Cape Cod was different. I was still dating the jungle-hiker, but I left him in Ottawa to board a Boston-bound flight followed by a bus to Wood’s Hole followed, finally, by a ferry to Vineyard Haven. It was a trip I took by, and for, myself.

I was 21 then and obsessed with all the privilege I didn’t have (though, in retrospect, I had a lot). I took pictures of Edgartown’s white clapboard houses, gawked at its moneyed residents, and became a quick study in Sperry Topsiders and Nantucket Reds. I stayed at a hostel but tried to pass for a local as I queued for Mad Martha’s ice cream, scarfed seafood shack scallops, and watched the sun set every evening in Menemsha. Then I flew back to Canada with a copy of The Preppy Handbook and a whole new set of aspirations, which I gripped tightly all the way to Yale the following year. Cape Cod was formative for me, fixing some ideal of American accomplishment in my mind. Thirteen years later, no other form of stateside wealth – not LA’s floor-to-ceiling slickness, Brooklyn Heights’ brownstone gentility, or Berkeley’s brand of doctorate-touting bohemia – has influenced me as deeply. I still love weathered shingles. I live for rumpled linen. I wear nautical striped shirts most days.

So it’s wonderful – and strange – to be back, this time with Finnegan and Emmett. Rather than packing a problematic out-of-print book and some Lilly Pulitzer pulled from the furthest reaches of my closet, I’m toting a toddler whose interest in the Cape is largely limited to its seashells, fire stations, and rocking chairs, and a husband who hates any hint of pretension (perhaps it’s good we’re here in the off season?). And rather than play-acting some Cape Cod fantasy, we’re living in the real thing: a lovely little house that’s been in my friend’s family for generations. It’s shingled and linen-filled and, yes, I’m wearing a striped shirt as I type this.

I sometimes wonder what the younger version of myself who first visited the Cape would think of our cozy quarters. After spending most of my 20s wishing for and working towards a life that felt out of reach, being here – laughing at the local paper’s advertisements for lobster nativity sets, watching the ocean wind whip my son’s hair, and incompetently explaining to him how lobster traps work – amounts to a realized dream of sorts. The dream life still isn’t mine, of course, but I get to relax into it for a few weeks. And with COVID-19 continuing to batter America, it’s great luck to be safe and warm in this comparatively safe corner of the country. It’s the sort of privilege that 21-year-old me could never have grasped but 34-year-old me is grateful for.