They bought the house before I was born. My grandparents lived in rented apartments all of their lives. But they bought the cape house. During the week, they lived in town, near jobs and shopping. But on Friday afternoons, they got in my grandpa’s large brown Impala, and headed toward the cape. My grandmother didn’t need to pack. She had a separate set of clothes, a separate set of linens and a separate set of everything where they were going. That was where they planned to retire. The little cape house with one bathroom and two bedrooms was their real home.
It was where my grandmother kept her rose garden and my grandfather grew his vegetable garden. It was where I learned to shell peas, drink the nectar from a nasturtium, and cut a rose in just the right spot. We caught toads in the garden. We caught minnows in the bay. We watched the gold and purple finches in the trees through the large bay window in the kitchen. We ran out barefoot to get root beer Popsicles from the ice cream truck.
A big dinner was always planned for Saturday nights on the cape when my family would visit them there. Most times, it was seafood. Sometimes it was lobsters and my brother and I would get to play with the lobsters on the floor before they were cooked.
We rarely went on any day trips while we were staying at the cape house with my grandparents; we just stayed at the house and went where we could walk. Once or twice we took the boat to Martha’s Vineyard, and once when I was 9 and my brother was 5, my grandparents took us to the tip of the cape, on a dune buggy tour. I remembered it all my life.
On Sunday afternoons, before they left for the week, they would scrub their little house from top to bottom. My grandmother would wipe down the table with alcohol and supervise my grandfather in washing the floor, vacuuming and changing the sheets for next week. She didn’t do any of that. She just made sure that he did it right. Everything was spic and span before they left. And then the little house sat and waited all week until they returned again.
My grandparents did manage to retire to their cape house for a few years, and now my parents have retired there, too.  …And now I know, I know I want to do what my grandparents and my parents had done. I want to retire on the cape. I want to do this not so that I can just sit and watch the ocean, but so that I can go for long walks and smell the beach roses, volunteer for a wildlife organization of some kind, have a rose garden of my own and a vegetable garden for my husband, go to the book sale on the square and spend all day pondering which books to buy. But most important, someday … show my grandchildren how to shell peas, drink the nectar from a nasturtium, and cut a rose in just the right place. I want to leave change on the table so they can run outside when the ice cream man comes down the street. I want to show them all the beauties of the cape so that maybe someday they too will fall in love with Cape Cod.