Postcard From My Slice of Paradise

Notes on my 49th season (and counting) on Cape Cod. Plus: Summer style rituals, modernist house inspiration, essential shellfish intel and the $27 pants I can't quit.

Greetings from the first week of summer. My son’s school year wrapped up last Wednesday. Thursday night I dug our bathing suits out of the bin at the back of the closet and stuffed our essentials into duffels. By Friday morning, we were on the road north. Headed here:

For 49 years, my summers have begun and ended in Wellfleet, a small village near the slim wrist of the outer Cape. How I got so lucky to live a fraction of my life amidst this slice of paradise is a matter of family lore. The story goes that one summer in the mid-60s, my mother’s older brother—a fledgling actor and aspiring bohemian—skipped out on the stifling Hartford suburbs and washed ashore in town. He took a room in the former Coast Guard station that became the beloved Beachcomber bar, overlooking Cahoon Hollow—and my mother, a year his junior, soon followed. When she and my father married, in July of 1969, they spent the first night of their honeymoon at the Fenway Motor Lodge (after taking in a game, natch). Then it was on to Wellfleet, where they bunked in with my uncle again—married now—in a cottage on Briar Lane, sharing a room with their infant nephew. (Romance!)

Nearly two-decades of rentals followed—a stretch that I arrived in the middle of. My memory of those years is a blur of wrinkly sheets, humming fans, sweating drinks, penny candy, splintery decks, and winding dune paths. The cabin in the scrub overlooking Long Pond, where mornings were misty and full of birdsong. The sun-bleached cottage on a bluff near Indian Neck, with a porch that stuck out like a ship’s prow.

In 1987—when I was 10—they finally bought a place of their own. An idiosyncratic artist’s cottage, hammered together out of salvage parts and anchored by a massive central brick hearth (complete with bread oven), it rests in a wooded hollow on the fringes of town, along the back road to Truro. There’s climbing roses and cedar shingles and peeling periwinkle trim. Quilt-covered loveseats tucked into reading nooks. A turret bedroom just big enough for a single bed. A screened porch and an outside shower and the biggest clawfoot tub I’ve ever seen.

Summer things: an outside-shower negroni; the back road to Truro; a riot of roses.

In the 90s, when I was in college, I worked summers at the produce stand behind Town Hall. Part of the shtick was that we did all the math by hand, counting ears of corn and weighing tomatoes, tallying vertiginous columns of numbers while a line of customers snaked into the parking lot. The joke went that if you wanted to have a nervous breakdown in August, you’d better come to Wellfleet—because every shrink between Brooklyn and Brookline was there. During the post-beach rush at the stand, there was always some comedian who thought it was hilarious to blurt out random digits while you wrestled with the arithmetic. One of my coworkers conducted a summer-long flirtation with me by tucking ripe figs into my lunch box. Needless to say, it was a job that taught me about more than how to sniff out a good melon.

In my thirties, I sometimes quipped that my primary professional goal was spending as many months in Wellfleet as possible. It wasn’t really a joke. And when my son was younger and I was a freelance writer and food editor, I had a good run—summers when I developed recipes and wrote during the day while he chased turtles at the Audubon camp, and packed cold pasta and tuna sandwiches so we could eat supper on the quiet beach, dodging surf and scouting shells until the sun went down.

That boy is bigger and life is busier now. My job at the WSJ is less forgiving of long office absences. (Though, trust: I push the envelope as farrrrrrr as it will go.) In this season of life, sojourns in Wellfleet feel more hard-won, tucked between baseball tournaments and music camp and story deadlines. But this stretch in June is our constant—a dozen dazzling days right around the solstice, when summer is fresh and full of promise and the village is just waking up for the season. Here, my heart wakes up, too.

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The Case For Clams

It feels blasphemous to write this in a town that’s literally synonymous with oysters—but truthfully, we’re more of a clam family. Give me a bowl of milky chowder. A tray of linguica-studded stuffies. A pile of linguine vongole. I’m set.

Luckily fresh clams are almost always an attainable luxury. In Wellfleet, the waters are open to recreational clammers and each license-holder is allowed to fill a bucket a week. When I’m here with my dad—who taught me everything I know about bivalves—we rarely miss an outing.

This week was one for the books: We topped almost two buckets with littlenecks, cherrystones and quahogs (aka: small, medium and large clams) in just shy of 30 minutes. At one point I was so giddy I abandoned my rake and just dug with my hands. Back home, I rinsed while Sam took a tally: 187.

Naturally, supper was a clamfest. The littlest ones I set aside to slurp raw, straight from the shell—an elemental pleasure that requires little more than a good clam knife (not the same thing as an oyster knife—R. Murphy makes a sturdy one) and a drizzle of mignionette (commit this recipe to memory).

The remainder I steamed, chopped and divided between a pot of Jasper White’s creamy chowder (thickened only with potatoes, as it should be) and a garlicky vat of wine, butter and parsley tossed with angel hair.

Scared to shuck? A few years back, while reporting this story on creative freezer cooking, I picked up a nifty trick: If you freeze clams and then let them come up to refrigerator temp, the shells pop open as they thaw. (The Ideas In Food folks call this “cryo-shucking." Magic!) The technique is especially handy for prepping New Haven Style-clam pizza. Which you should 10000% put on your summer bucket list.

On lazier days, there’s always the grill. Fast and finger-licking, Melissa Clark’s recipe for Grilled Clams with Lemon-Cayenne Butter is a hit I return to again and again. Add cold wine, a crusty baguette, a sliced tomato salad and damn. Welcome to the good life.

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Auction (Etc.) Edit: Cape Cod Modernism Edition

Not until I was a college art student did I realize that many of the familiar names I grew up seeing on driftwood signs on Wellfleet’s winding back roads—Breuer, Chermayeff, Saarinen and more—belonged to design royalty.

True story: Despite the Cape’s associations with quaint cottages and tony Kennedy-style compounds, in the mid-20th century, the area—especially the Outer Cape towns of Wellfleet and Truro—emerged as an unlikely modernist design mecca. The bold-faced names mentioned above built their experimental cottages in the 30s, 40s and 50s, but many other artists and intellectuals soon followed suit. By the 80s, more than 100 notable modernist homes had been erected amidst the sandy bluffs and kettle ponds—an under-the-radar architectural legacy that’s like the New England counterpart to Southern California’s Case Study houses.

That many continue to stand is owed in no small part to the Cape Cod Modern House Trust. Founded in 2007, it has rescued 4 historic homes in the years since, with another restoration (the Breuer house) underway. The finished sites are open for artist residencies and rentals (warning: they book fast!), as well as periodic semi-private tours. (Here are the dates for 2025.)

The Hatch house at evening.

My favorite is the Hatch House, designed in 1960 by Jack Hall for Walter Hatch, an editor at the Nation, and his wife Ruth, a painter. A weathered amalgamation of cubes connected by a geometric expanse of decking, it perches dynamically at the edge of the Bound Brook Island dunes, with a panoramic view of the bay and the Cape stretching towards its terminus in Provincetown. Wide screened windows and sliding doors erase the boundaries between indoor and out. In the airy living room, a bulbous ceramic woodstove sits in a circle of beach stones. Faded kilim pillows scatter across a minimalist banquette. Wenger rope chairs rub shoulders with grandma’s rattan. Nothing matches and everything is perfect. SEEEEEEEEE?

Restored living room at the Hatch House in Wellfleet, Massachusetts.

Anyway, because sometimes I like to just stare at this picture and try to imagine what it would feel like to spend a season there, this week’s shopping edit is dedicated to my copycat Hatch House fantasy. As usual, auctions are heavily represented, but I’ve thrown in a few other wildcards too. (WTF—Wayfair?!) Kind of crazy how well it all comes together, amiright?

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1. Harvey Probber Style Mid-Century Modern Walnut Extension Dining Table (Auction: June 23; Current Bid: $500)

2. Pottery Barn Chunky Wool Jute Rug in Natural, from $199

3. St. Frank Rouge Chevron Kilim Pillow, $125

4. Four Hitchcock Style Chairs With Rush Seats (Auction: June 22; Current Bid: $10)

5. Mid-Century Fireplace, $1,300

6. Aljandro Reclining Sofa, $2,170

7. Alvar Aalto Artek Stacking Stools, Pair (Auction: July 17; Current Bid: $325)

8. Mid-Century Modern Folding Rope Chair, Hans Wegner Style (Auction: June 21; Current Bid: $100)

9. Larry Zox, Niagara Series No. 5, Screenprint (Auction: June 26; Current Bid: $250)

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Summer Style Rituals

About 12 years ago, a young mom in a spasm of nostalgia, I bought a white “sailor’s rope” bracelet at a tacky souvenir shack. As if I were a 10-year-old camper again, I wore it all summer, until it was so dingy and fused to my wrist that the only way to remove it was with scissors. For $7, the amount of pleasure this thing gave me was all out of proportion. And honestly, I realized it was kind of fucking chic?!

So now I don one every year. Indeed, I consider the ritual purchase of a new rope bracelet an essential waypoint on my secular seasonal calendar. Maybe your inner child is in need of just such a delight? If so, you won’t find a better version than the Original Sailor Bracelet ($7.25) from Mystic Knotwork, the seafaring Connecticut shop where the iconic accessory originated.

Bonus: It also happens to pairs perfectly with my other summer always-wear: A ‘White Rebel’ ($85) Swatch. It’s gloriously analog! It’s waterproof! It might momentarily make you forget that you nearly qualify for AARP!

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Add To Cart

This dispatch has already gone on WAY too long (I’m meant to be on vacation, people!) but before I sign off, a public service announcement: Old Navy’s Mid-Rise Linen Blend Harem Pants are on sale for $27 and you probably need them.

I KNOW: The term ‘harem pants’ is both slightly offensive and terrifying. (MC Hammer, is that you?) But I promise there are no weird dropped crotches here—just lovely, breathable stretchy-waist pants with sweet little ties at the ankles that steer the look out of sweatpants land and are guaranteed to make you feel cute. I bought them in black and white a month ago and have worn the white pair 6 times this week alone. Pull them on for park picnics, office lunches, beach bonfires. I’m stocking up on another pair to keep in reserve for when I inevitably ruin one with cherry dip drips.