august 9th
there is something differnt about night time in chatham than anywhere else in the world. it could be the salty humidity that lingers in the air all the way through the night or the fact that the temperature stays in the 70s until you hit your pillow, but to me the magic of it seems inexplicable by science.
the stars in the sky are everywhere the same all over the world. what changes them is where you are. maybe you cant seem them as well at certain times, or in a city with lights lit up into the evening but here, when i tilt my head to the sky they’re all there, all the ones i’ve known since my first summer on the cape. seventy five degrees at 11:28 at night, two clouds in the sky, and a soft breeze coming off the millpond remind me why there are always so many tourists here. at the chatham a’s baseball games there are always advertisements for cape cod potato chips saying “the legand says that once you get the cape cod sand in your shoes you’ll always come back” and then something catchy and parallel about their potato chips, but i think that its the night that keeps people coming back. the quiet, the smell of the ocean in the pitch black night, and the crickets whose chirping you only hear after being outside for long enough to forget about why you came out in the first place.
sitting on my porch i can hear frogs croaking in the little pond thats buried in the cat tails and tall green plants. the light from the light house swings around across my lawn falling through the trees every twenty seconds. walking out onto the doc, the waves are only gently landing on the shore, quiet to let the renters sleep and slipping my feet into the water, the lightbulb jellies brushing by my feet. i can see the reflection of the moon on the water, and looking closer into the murky deep it seems like there is more light hitting the surface.
beneath the surface there was a whole pack of jellies, more than i’d every seen in my life, all together lighting up the water together. the light they made lit up the water so well that i could see all the way to the other side of the harbor, the bottoms of boats, and the snapper blues that swim along the bottom of the murky floor. i pulled my head up for air, and rubbed the salt out of my eyes, tearing up from the salt. once i could see again, i looked down at the water, and the light was gone, the jellies gone. so i lay back on the wooden dock, resting my shoulder blades down and resting my head down, looking at the sky. the stars were still there.
