The world outside my window just seems so surreal, the way it’s picked up and continued as though there is nothing deadly and invisible all around us. From my window, you would think nothing had changed. From my window, though, my worldview is so incredibly limited. It’s within the house that I’m painfully more aware […]
Tag: Shelter Island
Quarantine, Day 50
The longer this pandemic flows on, the more it seems the days grow somehow quieter, eerily quiet in fact. The bar beneath us hasn’t made a peep in well over a month. There are fewer cars on the street below, fewer voices on the corner with no one waiting for the bus. I know it’s […]
Changing Trains
There’s this moment after leaving the Secaucus station where the train ducks into a tunnel, and the deeper into the dark it goes, the quicker the air pressure changes as if to suck the little sickle cell up the vein to the heart of Manhattan. From under the Hudson, all the passengers are adjusting their […]
Caught in the Fog
This week there was a fog that covered Shelter Island for an entire day. It was light enough that standing in the middle of it, the warm colors of the autumn leaves blurred together a little like the yellows and reds of a Van Gogh. The distant trees on a small hill could’ve been any […]
Broken Shells in all their Goodness
On the southwestern tip of Shelter Island, there’s a hidden public beach called Shell Beach. I say it’s hidden because you could easily drive right by the unmarked turn-off for it in a residential area and never know it was there. But the beach itself is nearly a mile-long peninsula just barely wide enough for […]
What it Means to Know a Place, or Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea
For the past month, when I’ve been driving around, I’ve had the radio on “scan” just trying my hardest to get a feel for what Long Island and Connecticut (since we pick up some of those stations) have to offer. I’m fairly certain at this point that there’s some kind of unstated rule where every […]
From Point A to Point B
One of the first times I got on a plane, I remember being mesmerized less by the crazy notion that I was several thousand feet above the earth and more by the notion that in a matter of hours I had gone from point A to point B and found myself plopped into an entirely […]
Peace Corps on Shelter Island?
At the risk of sounding like I’m boasting, I’ll avoid any overuse of the words “idyllic” or “bucolic” or “precious” to describe the little island I recently moved to on the East End of Long Island. But it’s hard not to have this strange overwhelming sense of awe when I drive around Shelter Island – […]
