The Season Begins Again

To the editor:  Memorial Day arrives on Nantucket not as a date on a calendar but as a change in atmosphere.

You can feel it first in the air itself.

The damp gray heaviness of spring suddenly lifts for an afternoon. The wind softens. The harbor brightens. Hydrangeas begin preparing their annual explosion. Convertible tops disappear. Music drifts from patios and open windows. The long migration begins again—ferries unloading young workers, summer families, second-home owners, dreamers, drifters, exhausted restaurant staff, ambitious entrepreneurs, wealthy retirees, hopeful artists, and those simply searching for one beautiful summer before life changes again.

The island begins breathing differently.

And despite all the arguments surrounding Nantucket—housing battles, development pressures, overcrowding, privilege, resentment, worker exhaustion, impossible rents, and disappearing authenticity—one cannot deny the magic that arrives when the temperature rises above sixty-five degrees and the sun finally breaks through the clouds.

The mood changes almost instantly.

Laughter returns to the sidewalks. Windows open. People linger outdoors. Strangers become conversational again. Even the exhausted seem lighter.

Walking through town this past Memorial Day weekend, hearing the hum of conversation spill from restaurants and courtyards, I found myself remembering why people continue sacrificing so much simply to spend time here.

There are many beautiful places in America.

But very few possess Nantucket's peculiar emotional power.

The island does something to people.

For some, it awakens romance. For others, ambition. For others, nostalgia. For others still, a painful longing for lives they almost lived.

People come here believing they are simply visiting an island.

What they are often visiting is an alternate version of themselves.

A summer self.

A freer self. A younger self. A more beautiful self. A self more willing to fall in love, ride bicycles at sunset, stay out too late, forgive old mistakes, or begin again.

Perhaps that is the true season people come here seeking—not summer, but a season of the soul.

Perhaps that is why Nantucket exerts such unusual power over those who return year after year despite the expense, inconvenience, uncertainty, and occasional heartbreak the island can produce.

Nantucket is not merely geography.

It is emotional weather.

Those of us who have spent years here—not merely as tourists but as workers, caretakers, bartenders, landscapers, innkeepers, ferry crews, musicians, cooks, artists, tradesmen, and seasonal nomads—understand this in ways the brochures never could.

We see both realities at once.

The beauty and the strain. The elegance and the exhaustion. The extraordinary privilege and the quiet loneliness that can exist beneath it. The sunsets and the isolation. The champagne and the second jobs. The joy and the impermanence.

Yet somehow, every year, when the first true summer weekend arrives, the island casts its spell once more.

And for a moment, standing beneath the late afternoon light while hearing laughter echo down cobblestone streets, even the most cynical among us begin believing again.

Charles Dundee