We had been driving along in the full glory of a September afternoon on the Cape. It was a wonderful world of deep blues and green pines, of gleaming white sands and of sunshine singing over everything. I had been pointing out things, afraid she might miss them, or not see all there was to see in them.
She said, “I wish you could hear yourself as you sound to others. When you talk about the Cape it is as if you owned it, all of it,—and you treat everyone else here as your guest.” There was nothing to say to that because I knew it was the truth. Still, I knew that there was a better than even chance that, given a year, more or less, she would be irritating some newcomer from the Mainland with her own possessiveness. She said, “It is really a very nice place you know, especially on a day like this. But you have been everywhere and everywhere leads you right back here. You never leave the Cape except under protest, and you rush back as if it might disappear in your absence. What is it between you and the Cape?”
So I thought I would try, anyway, and I began:
“Cape Cod is a number of things, and it means a number of things to me....”