My home is Plum Island, Massachusetts. I’ve asserted that since I was about 10 or 11 years old. But the reality is: Plum Island started out as a summer house. My father, who grew up in Medford, Mass., started visiting the island when he was a boy in the 1920s and I first visited in 1965 when I was still in my mother’s womb. My folks bought the house my brother and I now live in back in 1972, when…
A bunch of different threads in this post today, the result of a bunch of different threads “runnin’ around the ol’ Duder’s head” the past few weeks. So bear with me while I talk through things out loud. Hey, it’s cheaper than therapy, although a lot less effective, I’ll grant you (and probably not very interesting to you). So, a month ago I wrote about how I’d thought about spending the summer when I was 26 at the surf break…
On Tuesday, the first of this month, I finally moved into the big room: the master bedroom. I slept in there a couple of scorching, humid, windless nights in August because it’s the only room in the house with air conditioning. My mother had A/C installed there years ago over my father’s objections. He was dead-set against air conditioning but I suppose in the interest of keeping the peace he caved on that one room. I hadn’t been able to…