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Wednesday, July 16 p-town inspirations
ok anyway and worked on during this grey drizzly sexy day
There was something magical about the last stretch of the excruciatingly long drive from Manhattan to Provincetown. Once the sand began to appear on the skirts of the one lane highway she knew the next bend in the road would reveal a trail of small white cottages lined up along the shore as if licking at the beach. She imagined their tenants; newlyweds, couples with small children, loners with fishing rods. The people came and went but the cottages stayed the same every year, dotting the way towards town. She had the same feeling every time she took that last turn. She’d first visited the town on a whim. A travel buddy had suggested a spontaneous weekend away, some place on the ocean, gay friendly. They picked “P-town” because it sounded like a place where one could go to escape. The idea of an old fishing village, turned into an artist’s colony perched at the very tip of Cape Cod, seemed like just the ticket for two city weary girls recuperating from a string of lousy jobs and bad break-ups. Her friend; Anne had anointed the town marvelous while in the middle of her first lobster dinner in town. It didn’t take much to please Anne; a sunny day, good food, a nice clean room. Halfway between the claw and tail meat Anne had decided that P-town was okay by her, but Leah needed more time to sift past the tourist heavy streets and blaring disco. She needed to get a sense of what the town was about underneath. The first time she walked the stretch of beach along the bay from the east end of town to the west, she began to feel something surrendering inside her. She looked out at the sail boats rocking back and forth, trying to pry away from their anchors. She watched the gulls swoop over the pier searching, searching. She smiled at the wild flowers climbing up the fence of the tiny yellow wooden house. But it was the bay at night that moved her. She loved watching the lights go on in the front glass paned rooms of the grey cottages as artists touched their canvas, as mothers served dinner, as men embraced each other. Her heart purred with the distant sound of fog horns, the gentle pushing and pulling of the black moonlit water. Leah was collecting. She was unaware of this at the time, but in each captured vision she was building a foundation. She’d dug the basement out the first time she saw the sun set over Herring Cove Beach, but it was the bay that formed the concrete for this home to rest on, this home yet to be built inside of her. Anne went back to the city content with her tan and shopping bags filled with souvenirs, but Leah wasn’t settled. There was something about this little town bursting with people that wouldn’t let her go. She’d heard the locals say that to understand the underbelly of Provincetown you need to live there year round. You need to watch the tourists go away, the restaurants close for the season, the bars board up their windows and the pastel wild flowers succumb to snow, wind and salt. The thought of the town covered in nothingness sounded something like ecstacy to Leah and so on the year of her 28th birthday she sublet her Chelsea apartment and rented a tiny one room bungalow hidden behind a high wooden fence. It wasn’t on the water, didn’t have a view of anything but the backside of the local grocery store, but the little grassy front yard and the smell of the bay just two blocks away was all she needed. She didn’t pack much; a couple bags of clothing and an electric typewriter. She’d come to P-town to get rid of baggage not bring it with her. She liked the simplicity of the one room home. It was rustic to the extreme with exposed insulation on the ceiling and a plastic shower stall standing next to the stove in the kitchen. She bought a mattress, a throw rug and a rocking chair. With that, she declared her home complete. The first snow storm of the winter railed against the tiny bungalow. Leah wrapped herself in the patchwork quilt and watched the snow throw itself against the windows. The small one room home, surrounded by windows had always felt to her like the inside of a boat and with the storm shaking the walls, the crashing of the wind, the transformation was complete. She closed her eyes and fantasized that she was out at sea defying the odds by plowing her small fishing boat against the massive waves. She liked to daydream this way, pretending to be brave. When she opened her eyes she was struck with the overwhelming sensation of not being alone. It seemed as though the many souls who had lived here before her had left something behind. She looked up at the tiny skylight in the center of the ceiling and in a rush felt the parade of eyes that had looked up from their bed into this skylight before her. She knew that they too had bundled up in snow storms and they too had felt somehow un-alone. “I hear you,” she said out loud to no one, to everyone. “Yes…” the wind answered back whistling through its gentle rage. But that was a decade ago, when she was still young enough to listen for the sounds no one heard.
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