Winter in Rockport – February – 06


It was to be two things for us; a chance to knock those snug winter doldrums askew before February’s onslaught, and a research trip for me. The choreography of our kids’ care and safety while we were away was in place and we’d been looking forward to this long weekend. Perhaps I was looking forward to it too much, since February, the month of my recently deceased brother’s birthday, was the month I’d chosen for our slip from everyday life. I needed a few days that couldn’t possibly align themselves with quotidian tasks and could transport me to the place where I’d set my novel, to the time and the house I’d chosen, and deliver my husband and me to more intimate corners of our marriage that seem more distant when life gets in the way.

Rockport, Massachusetts, a tiny town on Cape Ann that shares its getaway status in a very different way with Gloucester, is just 6 hours away from Philadelphia, without three kids, a dog, and stops for fast food and bathrooms times five. Once you get near it, you’ll know. Aside from the signs that start welcoming you into New England’s venerable towns established in the 16th and 17th centuries, you begin to feel the ocean, even in winter.

There is sand on the shoulders. Even mixed with grey, grainy snow, you can see the sand. The marshes along Route 128 are covered in snow, but by then, the bay is to your left and you’re about to enter the Cape.

I should mention that we’ve been to Rockport in the summer numerous times, to the same inn where we were headed on this particular Super Bowl February weekend when the Eagles were pitted against the Patriots (and lost). Summer in a town like Rockport that is nirvana for artists and shop owners from ice cream to sterling silver is the same to any tourist who doesn’t mind a bit of a crowd. We’ve loved it, coming ourselves two consecutive years as a treat following rigorous White Mountain hikes, then last summer bringing our children and my parents who also drank it in. We would have stayed on if school weren’t about to start.

A summer town in winter is a quirky choice to make for a getaway when your friends are going to the Dominican Republic, Hawaii, and Trinidad. It might even be a brave choice. But I had to see and feel Rockport buried in quiet to be able to understand it in a season other than the one that brings flocks of people, like a winged migration, between April and October.

Since we started coming here, we've favored the Linden Tree Inn. It is just a block up the road from the Atlantic Ocean and down the street from the Sandy Bay Historical Society. From the inn’s cupola, or widow's watch, through leafless branches you can see the Union Cemetery where the town’s Civil War soldiers are buried, and far to the right, a lighthouse, one of the twin Thacher lights. Rockport Presbyterian’s spire rises above the town, clearing the trees. Mill Pond, where in summer painters set their easels along its pathway, is a stone’s throw. Up here in winter, with the morning sun shining so brightly I can hardly see my computer’s monitor, I hear the ducks even with the windows closed, see them skating onto the ice as they land. It’s a small, square room, hardly larger than a bathroom, with a telescope and windows that ogle the town from all sides. You can see the foam of the ocean as it swirls and eddies against the rocks.

John and Tobey Shepherd, the innkeepers, have put two chairs up here and a table so that I can write. I like to imagine that one of my female characters spends time up here, wondering about her fate, why she’s been dealt such a loss. Perhaps it’s trite, having a character in a fishing town in the 1870’s lose her husband at sea. Or maybe it’s prophetic. I didn’t know what it felt like to lose a loved one when I set out to write my novel. Ironically, it was my brother, Colin, a writer working on his own book, who encouraged me to get off my laurels and just do. So, I am here for him, too.

One of the places we revisited was a café-bistro called Alchemy on Gloucester’s Main Street. When we first started going there after a leisurely poke-around across the street at Mystery Train, the used music/book store we can still hardly leave each time we enter, Alchemy was a charming carpet bag of a joint, with old couches on tattered rugs, baskets of books and toys to distract children while their parents fiendishly darted a few feet away to the juice and coffee bar and chose a dessert. Now, a couple of years after our first visit, the place is completely transformed. The couches are leather, elegantly strewn with throw pillows I coveted as soon as I sat back in one, and the menu is gourmet deli. The juice and coffee bar are gone, but the toy and baskets remain, stowed under a large coffee table. We sat there all afternoon, me poking at my laptop, my husband at his while he enjoyed the Greek salad and a latte and I lapped up the pumpkin carrot soup. The gratis wireless was a dividend we didn’t expect.

The Linden Tree Inn was built around 1850 as a residence and in the 1920’s it became an inn when the daughter who was raised in the house began to take in guests, calling it Broadview House. The Shepherds took it on as newlyweds in 2002 and keep it open all year, with lulls in winter that have made this house our home for this particular weekend. For, while they have retreats and conventions ideally scheduled for these quiet spells, we are the only guests. The house doesn’t echo with our footsteps; it absorbs us. The radiators twitter early in the evening, then fade to a whisper that keeps the house hearthside warm.

One thing we love about the Linden Tree is Tobey’s breakfasts, served in the formal dining room that is intimate enough to feel like your own and large enough to be almost grand, with elegant furniture, seamlessly built-in hutches that must date back to when the house was built, and a bay window where there is one of four tables for two around the larger table.

The aroma of Tobey’s scones swelling in the oven and her coffee ripening in the Bodum waft to the cathedral ceilings. Because we’re the only guests this weekend, we can ask for breakfast at whatever time our hearts desire it. Tobey is glad enough that we’re not early birds, but she and her husband, John, an affable Brit and an economics professor at Bentley College, are well-accustomed to those who rise early to take in what they can. If we’d said we eat breakfast at 7:30, they wouldn’t have blinked, though it would mean rising before the sun.

Something about being around the British, and remembering how I drank tea in Canada where I was born and raised, makes me want to drink my P.J. Tipps the way John would, so I do. After all, I’m on holiday.

After breakfast, we sometimes sat on the enclosed side porch, summery in any season, with white wicker furniture cushioned in blue with those Victorian patterns that invite you into another time. In the afternoon, it is drenched in sunlight and a perfect room for reading. Retreat groups and conferences that the Shepherds encourage to book at the inn gather there as they do in the dining and living rooms to conduct their programs.

In the summer, after a deliciously filling seafood meal at the locally popular Fish Shack (now under construction, but normally open in winter, too), we would amble along the Bearskin Neck toward the water and poke our heads in and out of shops and galleries, buy indiscriminate amounts of penny candy from Tuck’s. But it is winter. So, each evening after dinner we retire to the living room at the inn, a room off the main hallway, with plush couches flanking the doorway in an L-shape so that you feel brought toward them. There is a wood-burning stove and a pleasing Victorian sensibility in the way the room is furnished that flows with the rest of the house.

There Joe and I work on our separate projects, absorbed in them, just as free to stretch out and cuddle while we watch a movie as if we were in our own living space. On one evening, we do, and it’s more of a delight than I’d imagined. Somehow, I worried that this - something we can do at home in our own family room - would be a waste of precious time. But perhaps because it is precious, one should allow a little of it to go to waste now and then and to taste that pleasure without worrying about time ebbing the way the tide does.

As reliable as the tide were those few winter nights we spent at the inn, lulled by the house’s sonorous quiet, behind it the distant thunder of the surf, a rhythmic roar that placed itself just behind a membrane thin wall of my consciousness. It was quiet enough to allow for sleep, the thunder and hiss of the ocean present enough a reminder that we weren’t in Philadelphia.