See, now THIS is why I really need to finish up all my works-in-progress. Because on days like today, I get deliveries of glorious and tantalizing new books like THIS:
It’s one of my favorite complaints to say that the village I grew up in on Cape Cod was utterly bereft of kids of my age. And it’s true, more or less. For most of my youth, there were maybe two or three kids who lived within a mile or so of my house who were roughly my age. Of course we all understand that the degree of forgiveness for what counts as “my age” when you’re young is very, very small. You’d have to be no more than one or two grades above or below me to qualify. Hey, I don’t make the rules.
But even if we were being really generous, and said kids within four or five years qualified, I lived in an absolute kid desert. This was Cape Cod, after all, and Cape Cod in the ‘70s and ‘80s at that. The Cape has never been distinguished for its age diversity, and the trend these days is toward fewer kids still. We’re finding we need fewer elementary schools around here, not more. It's a retirement community. It's a fertile land of wise elders. And I love that about us. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
I didn’t co
me here to sing my favorite song about how hard it was to grow up in sleepy little West Dennis in a landscape relatively unpeople by neighbor kids. I actually came here to praise it. And to think about how it led to some of the adult choices I’ve made.
My mother was originally trained as a nurse. She’d worked in the emergency room at the hospital* for ten years or so before burning out, then went back to school to learn how to teach special ed. But she kept up her RN license all of her life (which is still in progress, I’m glad to report). And that meant that she spent a fair bit of her time administering various shots and medications to the folks who lived on my street.
*This is another one of my favorite fake complaints about life on Cape Cod — that there’s only one of so many big, important things around here that we never even have to actually name them properly. I didn't grow up calling it “Cape Cod Hospital,” it was just “the hospital.” Nobody called it Route 6, they called it “the highway.” Cape Cod Community College was either “Four Cs” or “the college.” There’s just the one, so why bother? I love that about us.
Anyway, the fact that there weren’t any kids didn’t mean there wasn’t anybody at all. Sure, there were (and still are) entire neighborhoods that emptied out entirely after summer, but by definition, nobody year-round really lived there.
No, my part of West Dennis was the really old part, with streets lined with great creaking old houses with shingles that went back to the sailing ship days. (I refuse to call them “sea captains’ houses” like other towns I could mention tend to, since they can hardly all have been captains, now can they? Were there no cabin boys? I like to think of Dennis as the town of first mates. Maybe there was a ship’s cook here and there. We can’t all be captains. Nor should we be. Here here. It’s in keeping with our overall brand of being the middlest of the mid-Cape. We’re the most un-flashy Cape town. I also love that about us.)
Those creaky old houses weren’t empty, although you might be forgiven for thinking so at first look. Sure, most of the windows were steadfastly darkened at night. But if you just craned your neck around the lilac bushes a bit, past the gnarled old crabapple tree in the yard, you’ll see there’s a light on in the kitchen out back. There is also, undoubtedly, a small room off that kitchen that’s been made into a bedroom, whether that was its original purpose or not. And in that kitchen and bedroom lives a very old lady, who usually if not always buys seeds and light bulbs and girl scout cookies from me when I knock on her door at that time of year, and whose daily newspaper (it's “the paper,” of course, although we all know it’s the good old Cape Cod Standard-Times) I deliver on the route that I share with my two older brothers. 
That old lady bakes cookies. She bakes them a lot. She’s almost always got a few dozen on the cooling racks when I hop off the school bus at the end of the day. Or she’s got a few murder mysteries in a stack on the table, which I could maybe drop off at the West Dennis Library ("the library") on my way back home. Or she wonders if I can pull something down from a shelf?
And she also, most likely, has my mother come by on a regular basis to give her a vitamin B shot, or some other shot that nobody explains to me. Sometimes Mom lets me come along on those nurse-y trips, but usually not, out of deference to the aversion most of us feel to letting some neighborhood kid see your bare naked butt, no matter how handy she is with the library books.
But it was all the same to me. I saw enough friendly, cheerful, naked old lady butts to feel pretty at home with the whole getting old thing. It’s the end we all come to. If you know what I mean.
I thought those old ladies were living pretty great lives, all alone in their vast, drafty houses with all those great echoing rooms nobody really lived in anymore. Oh, they were full of treasures and stories. Sometimes I’d hear someone playing the piano in the front parlor on Sundays. Sometimes I’d see a curtain flutter in a third story window. Always, I'd borrow their books if they let me.
The first Agatha Christie I ever read was a loaner from old Mrs. Dougherty down the street. And Mrs. Ryder across from us had written her own. So they chatted with me, and stuffed me with cookies and got me and my brothers to do odd jobs for them. And I always heard rumors of quilting and gardening clubs and ferocious bridge battles that I was not privy to. But for the most part, their lives were being lived quite happily and well in those back kitchen bedsits. Somehow we all managed to be fiercely self-sufficient and quietly dependent on each other at the same time.
Oh sure
, occasionally one or two of them would have flocks of family members descend on them for the holidays, or for two quick weeks in August, all crammed in a car from Wellesley or Greenwich or wherever that family spent the rest of their time.
But mostly my ladies were left to get along on their own. And they’d keep visiting with each other, before and after those visits, or invite one or two of us kids in, for a cookie and some conversation and a chore here or there.
Is it any wonder I grew up with much less of a fixed notion that I’d settle down and have kids than a strong, unspoken wish to live in a drafty old house with a light on in the back? Of course I now live in sight of another village library, in another old sailor’s house with floorboards that wobble and pitch like it’s far off at sea. Of course I plan to stay here all of my days, cooling cookies on old wire racks, piling up quilts, and possibly eventually taking up bridge.
Sometimes I think I’ve lived my whole life longing for the day when I can live out that dream of being the old lady in my big old house, burning the light out in the kitchen while I read borrowed books long into the night. But if you don’t mind, I’ll keep my buns to myself.
