Views & Reviews

It will not be news to the seafaring folk of Marblehead that in order to get out to a boat in Marblehead Harbor, you have to get into another boat. I have observed this from the safe shore of Crocker Park many times. Recently, a kind neighbor invited my partner and I out onto his boat over Labor Day. And so as we stood on the dock at the Boston Yacht Club waiting for a ride, what caught my attention was the youth of the taxi pilot: a young man, barely out of his teens if he’d made it there at all. Back home, I was literally raised on a tractor seat. That photo is me on my dad’s lap at bean harvest, circa 1979. The open-cab combine had manual steering and whirring blades of death a few feet below my perch. A scene so commonplace on the farm back then that my mom thought nothing of snapp...

Mid-to-late September. The town draws a collective breath and puts on its “resting face.” That’s the intimate smile reserved for year-round neighbors, more at-ease than the outward-looking seasonal smiles that welcome summer vacationers. As we settle into the familiar routines of school days, after-school activities and serious weekly groceries, we’re aware that summer has not quit us yet. This moment is our own private summer. We take time to note briney breezes, houses still decked in flags and flowers, the evening song of crickets and the silence between breaking waves. Mid-to-late September is a great time for a lobster roll, says chef Linda Bassett COURTESY PHOTO Now’s when we really savor a lobster roll. On the deck, the front porch or the beach. No waiting in lines at our ...