Thyme
There’s a particular kind of quiet that settles over a coastal town in September, once the last of the summer crowds have gone home and the local shops have stopped bracing themselves for the weekend rush. Patrick and I drove up the coast on one of those impossibly clear, slightly cool Saturdays, the kind where the sky and the water seem to be competing over which can be a deeper blue, and we didn’t have much of a plan beyond following the road wherever it wanted to take us.
We started in one of those small harbor towns where the working fishing boats and the sailboats share the same dock without much fuss, lobster traps stacked along the pier in their faded colors, gulls arguing over something near the bait shop. We wandered without any real destination, which is, I’ve come to believe, the only correct way to see a town like this. We ducked into a gallery that smelled like linseed oil and old wood. We found a bakery with a line out the door and decided that was reason enough to wait in it, and came away with something warm wrapped in paper that we ate standing at the railing overlooking the water, because some things should not wait until you’re sitting down.
Further along, the road hugs the shoreline closely enough that you catch the ocean in pieces between the trees and the rooftops, and then suddenly it opens up entirely and there’s nothing between you and the horizon. We stopped at a rocky overlook where the waves were doing that slow, rhythmic thing against the granite, and Patrick, who is not usually a man given to standing still for long, stood still for a long time, just watching it.
By the time we found our way to a little seafood shack for a late lunch, we’d lost track of how many little towns we’d passed through and how many of them we’d promised ourselves we’d come back to properly. We ate at a picnic table outside, plastic baskets lined with paper, the kind of place where you order at a window and they call your number, and it was somehow exactly the right ending to a day built entirely out of small, unplanned moments.
We drove home as the light went gold and then pink over the water, windows down, not saying much, which after a day like that felt like its own kind of conversation. New England does this particular trick better than almost anywhere I’ve been: it lets you feel like you’ve traveled somewhere far away without ever really leaving home.