Sandy Neck Lighthouse (1857). PropertyCapeCod.com.
Now with the summer coming to an end, slowly here where we will have several more weeks of climate disruption heat but inexorably, I’m remembering what Labor Day meant to me growing up: the dispersal of the summer community.
The exodus from the suffocating summer heat in Kentucky began after Memorial Day but for my family, it was August and August only in a rented house on Cape Cod, a different house every summer—and how much fun that was!—timed to end with packing and car loading after Labor Day.
When I was a teenager, the freedom of those rented houses was exhilarating: the smell of salt in cedar closets, the collection of shells on a windowsill (when there were still shells), the rented bike that meant I could pedal to the beach or into town, a freedom I’d never known growing up in the suburbs where everything depended on cars.
So it was the summer itself that was the romance, but then a good-looking and attentive teenage boy added its own particular spice.
Out in a small sailboard, a new experience for me, or meeting in town for ice cream or a band concert were heady with the home restrictions somewhat released. It was all an adventure. Once I stepped on a piece of broken glass when we were docking the sailboat, opening a scary fissure in the bottom of my foot. We went to my friend’s house to get something to staunch the bleeding but found his grandmother entertaining a man friend with the family photograph albums. Politely we waited till my blood ran on the rug—the priority was clearly her guest. Then of course the cut was taken care of although I had the scar for a long time, and was glad to check it out and be reminded.
This nice young man wanted to give me a present to mark our good times together. I knew exactly what I wanted: a pink button-down boy’s shirt with collar and long sleeves. I’d admired the rows of such shirts in my older brothers’ drawers without daring to borrow one. Now I would have one of my own; we shopped at a former sail loft on the bridge and found the exact thing.
Did I wear it with the unselfconscious insouciance I admired in all the young men I knew?
Probably not. It was slightly, if only slightly, transgressive, the closest I came to cross-dressing. But the shirt and the summer fused with the scar on my foot to create a scintillating memory, never to be repeated but always precious, the good time before everything became, with sex, so complicated.
Next week all the summer colonies will be packing up. A last glance through a rented house will show a sandal under a bed, a coloring book left out on a bench, a bike key that needs to be placed in a bike lock before the bike is returned. The Labor Day tennis tournament will have revealed its winners and losers, all those handsome, evenly-tanned blond women in their short white tennis skirts exhibiting balletic serves.
But the gold cup to my mind is not the real prize: it’s the light far out over the Atlantic and the steady beam of the lighthouse flashing across my bed at night.
And I must add it was a time and a place where everyone seemed to be white, good-looking, healthy, and well-off and with no awareness of the enormous changes about to come—except of course for the black cooks in those kitchens, sighing as they picked crab meat out of the shells of crabs caught in a tidal river with a piece of fish on the end of a string.
Hey this is the first piece have read by you. You write well. I would never have read this had I not met you and been taken in by your authentic charm.
Thank you sallie ,
Aaron Rhodes ( Laura’s brother) my sister lives across the street from you.
I would love the chance to have a cup of tea with you sometime. You have my #