in this house it is always summer
This is the first line of “1724”, a poem written by a member of the family who owned the Josiah Coffin House, a.k.a. 1724, in Nantucket, Massachusetts, a house our family rented for twenty-eight summers.
1724 held us confidingly in its idiosyncrasies and inconveniences, like the rope-pull for the steep spiral staircase and gritty floorboards that creaked and shifted underfoot. No full-length mirrors. The pilot light on the stove had to be lit with a match.
1724 didn’t change from year to year, except in odd, miniscule ways. A random chair might get a new slipcover. Other things, like its blended smell of mothballs and boxwood, stayed the same. Inside those walls, we were insulated from the seismic shift of the island’s ethos. During our first Nantucket decade, town was where you walked to get milkshakes. Now, it is the province of the One Percent, drivers of Range Rovers rattling over its cobblestones.
This new aspect of Nantucket- flagrant wealth- was nothing like our Nantucket, as experienced from 1724, from which we schlepped to the beach in threadbare towels. But our Nantucket has, in fact, become this new Nantucket, and 1724, a fixer-upper with a prized location, was sold for nearly five million dollars.
it is always every summer in this house
That’s the last line of “1724”.
Every, of course, changes everything, and breaks my heart. What happens to every summer when the place it has been, always, is no more?
Still. We are going back to Nantucket in a few days, and I find myself coping by no longer thinking of always every summer as a specific, beloved home, but a feeling. Like when you are falling asleep after hours of swimming in the ocean, that sensation of the tide rocking you gently. Even though you are no longer there, every, always, you close your eyes, and you are.