The Island’s Wise Counsel

By Icy Frantz

Hello September. I can see you peeking out from behind the staked green tomatoes that are beginning to blush a crimson red, interrupting my thoughts, my days, and waking me from the summer solitude.

Some years, it’s a lingering, slow coming-to, and other times it’s a shrill alarm that startles me, coercing me from a long barefooted beach walk back into shoes that are confining, rigid, uncomfortable at the very least. My feet have thoroughly enjoyed the plein air.

But as always, the quiet times allow me to think, and overthink — guilty as charged — and so I share with you some of my thoughts and insights gifted to me from the sandy shores of a small spit of land 30 miles from a Massachusetts coastline.

The island teaches in quiet ways, not from a pulpit, but in a whisper