Summer Is Upon Us

The Cape’s traditional start to the busy season gets underway Memorial Day weekend. Traffic begins to back up, crowds gather and umbrellas sprout on the beaches like flowers in the meadows.

Spring on the Cape never fully seems to make up its mind. Early in the season, the cold bleakness of winter seemed to hang on stubbornly, refusing to yield to the soft greenery that is budding forth.

By late May, the woods, fields and marshes are in full bloom, already moving past April’s early flowers into the greenery of summer. The ospreys have since settled down and now wheel above, foraging for their young families in the nest. Great blue herons and snowy egrets patrol the shallows for fish. Summer brings with it the whine of cicadas and the background hum of outboard motors on the sounds and bays. The afternoon haze begins in earnest, partnering with the southwest breeze that kicks up, only to quiet down as evening comes on. Spring peepers, pinkletinks to some, rest their voices and the chorus is assumed by the crickets.

The comfortable weather of late spring will give way to the muggy heat of summer soon enough, and we will celebrate the onward march of one season to another atop the shifting sands of our peninsula. In the meantime, it is lucky that, even for a moment, we get a chance to stop and see the Cape coming to life around us.

John H. Hough