In the fading evening light, I hunted for poop.  In the distance, looking like an annoyed maitre d’, the poodle, Buttercup, stood next to a blooming bush of hydrangea.  He expected me to throw him a stick, scratch him on the butt, or at least offer him a treat.  Instead, I stepped around the grass with a red snow shovel and hunted down the hors d’oeuvres he had left.  Buttercup got distracted by a bug and went bounding into the side yard.  

Some things make the room a little dusty.  I sit, stare at the picture, or watch the video of the a German Shepherd greeting a returning Sergeant and the room gets a little misty.  Whole warehouses of video and photos on the internet are designed to bring my emotions up to my throat.  I know where that warehouse is and I don’t choose to park their very often.

Winter has broken.  The curves and arcs of snow have subsided into gray spikes, and then into sand and debris.  The ground still remains brown and frozen, locking the daffodils and the crocuses underground for another few days until the days turn mud wonderful and something green shoots up.  

I have been married for over a year.

In a year, the red and green of our personalities have slowly mixed into a mutual brown.  As these things go, we have made a charming and comfortable color, one that could be found on a pair of L.L. Bean Chinos or on fresh cut oak.  Brown is brown, however; muddled, common, and as firm as an old chair. 

On Sunday afternoon, we looked in the paper and found that the Boston Symphony Orchestra was playing Beethoven's Fifth at Tanglewood in Lenox, MA.  To those of us of a certain age, the famous opening brings us back to Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd.  Our parents know it as the Victory Symphony or something perhaps a little darker, where the famous three note motif (bum-bum-bum-baaam) are the knock of fate (or the pizza delivery man). 

I am moving again.  It isn’t a very long move, or a permanent one, but it does involve emptying the closets and taping the boxes back together.  Nantucketers get used to moving.  We move from one bedroom to another, one apartment to another, one house to another depending on the seasons, the houseguests, or the marital weather gauge.  Most islanders have a store of collapsed liquor boxes somewhere in a closet or a garage, ready to spring to action and collect the valuables.

The radio rolled out with attacks in Libya, a new iPhone in California, and a memorial service at the World Trade Centers before it muttered out the “Beach and Boating Forecast” and the tides for the day.  Then I shut it off.  Instead of the radio and the traffic, the open window offered a thick slice of silence.  Far off in the distance, the waves crashed on the south shore and a school bus drove up the Madaket Road.  Otherwise, God had nothing to say.   

Sometime last week, while I was busy throwing children at Jetties or losing golf balls at Skinners, the tide turned.  Summer, which has been flooding the island for months, had come to slack water, and then, the boats swung on their moorings, and summer ebbed. 

In the last two weeks, Nantucket has been roiled by one of the stupidest and most ignorant land deals of all time.  The Boy Scouts have a 100 acre camp just off Old South Road called Camp Richard.  The Camp has been hosting Boy Scout troops from up and down the East coast since 1955.  They groups come out, sleep in sleeping bags, orienteer, tie knots, go swimming, and do a hundred other Boy Scout things.  In sixty years, few people on island could even find the gate.  But the gate, and the rest of the 100 acres is on Nantucket, and that makes if very valuable.

I am tired of the Pops.

I am tired of the advertising.  I am tired of the questions. I am tired of the cars.  I am tired of the crowds.