A Mid-Winter's Days Tale

This is a photo of Cape Cod in the winter. It does have its charms for sure. It's quiet, it's serene, and quite beautiful, and it can also drive you crazy. And you might find that this is what passes for big-time fun.

Anyone who lives in a resort area knows that the off-season can be a time to restore and brace yourself for the onslaught of tourists, and it can also be so quiet that it make you a bit loopy. My son Ben says the Cape is bipolar - it's happy and upbeat in the summer, and dark and depressed in the winter. This is why my favorite season is the more emotionally balanced fall. We have Septembers here that I challenge any other place to match.

But that brings me back to winter, and the arduous process of getting through it on this peninsula. I could sight the dark side of drugs and alcohol, which we surely have in spades here, but thankfully, that is not the route I choose. No, my drugs of choice are more along the chocolate and bad TV variety.

I swear, I think shows like "Scott Baio is 46 And Pregnant" and "Celebrity Rehab" get decent ratings because there are people living where there's not a hell of a lot going on tuning in because well, frankly it's more interesting than re-caulking their bathtub.

Every year I have great plans for what I will do during the winter - repainting my bedroom comes to mind, but instead I seem to fall into this carbohydrate-induced semi-coma that negates anything that ambitious.

Even the way I dress changes. No longer do I stand in my closet thinking about what cute top to wear, no, it becomes all about how many layers I can put on and still move my arms well enough to type and raise a cocoa mug to my mouth.

There are things going on of course; art openings, concerts and movies. As a matter of fact I went to the movies last night. There were four other people in the theater.

Living on Cape Cod in the winter isn't for sissies, but it does have its advantages. Without lots of social distractions I do get a lot of work done - despite myself. Now that my daughter has headed back to college I have no more excuses for not slogging away at my rewrite of my novel, or pitching all those great story ideas I've been sitting on. Well, all right, I will now COME UP with great story ideas to pitch.

Moving somewhere else at times does seem appealing, someplace where you would see more people than the five you always see at the coffee shop, but then I go visit my son in Boston and I don't know, it's a little overwhelming. There are so many people, so many cars,and people actually sit next to you in the theater.

So I'll stay here for now until something lures me to the mainland. I will ride the tide of the seasons - overwhelmed by traffic and crowds in the summer, and lulled into hibernation in the winter. All things considered, it's kind of cool to feel like a movie star who just bought out the whole theater for themselves. That's my fantasy and I'm sticking to it. Until Memorial Day anyway.