I wiped away the weeds & foam. / I fetched my sea-born treasures home... Ralph Waldo Emerson







Friday, June 25, 2010

Cape Cod Part One



pls click above for link to My Creative Space
[maybe leftclick for link? It is post June 18, 2010]



"You're sure to fall in love with
olde Cape Cod...la-la-la."
I'm never sure what the appeal is, but somehow Cape Cod has a magic that draws me back each summer.

This year, since my parents are gone now, we stayed at the lovely Ocean Edge Resort, in Brewster. http://www.oceanedge.com/ An exceptional stay, especially dinner at sunset on a balcony terrace overlooking moonlit Cape Cod Bay. Another great dinner at Joe's Grill at Barley Neck Inn, near Nauset Beach. This fun tavern has great food and a lively atmosphere, housed in an authentic 1800's seafarers' inn.

Cape Cod is one of those rather strange beach vacation places where you could stay for a month (or twenty years!) and never find or see the ocean. Sadly, the water is rarely visible and the beaches are hidden and narrow, with pebble-y shores and coarse sand. Lucky for me I know how to wind past Six Penny Lane, up Saltworks Road, past Paine's Creek to tiny but special Robbin's Hill Beach. We call it Liz's beach, after my mother who loved it so....

This is the first summer we've been in Brewster without a Jeep bearing Cape & Islands license plates and resident beach, yacht club, and dump stickers. But I found out, playing tourist, that we could park there after 3 PM.
Since Cape Cod's shores are so hidden one's eyes turn inland to the charming narrow roads and lanes...

which, in June, are edged by incredible banks of field flowers...yellow and orange lilies, Russian sage, painted daisies, lavender, roses of every kind,usually pink. Grass so green it hurts your eyes!

 And it seems every single greyshingled house is the backdrop for glorious blue hyrangeas.



Blues like I have never seen elsewhere else,

...a quirk of soil and sun angles and clear Cape Cod light.

And now and then, a rare pretty pink...


And here, out on the tip of the Cape's elbow, almost at Nauset Beach and the [rumored to be] large National Seashore Beach, is an ancient churchyard where the Pilgrims now rest, a rolling meadow of peace....

Many of these old stones date to the 1600s, though most are illegible now after four hundred years of Cape Cod weather.
And here's an herb garden in the front of a grey clapboard house built in the 1600s.


Isn't it charming? Cape Cod, in its summer blues!

And surely we'll be back! Circumstances robbed us of our ice cream cones at  Cobie's or Kate's! Yeah, we'll definitely return.

There's that magic, right?

love
                 
                lizzy

                ...gone to the beach