Short stories

Our local National Public Radio station, WCAI, has a nice feature they call "Voices of the Cape and Islands". They are short (almost always less than a minute) sound bites that are played between programs and announcements throughout the day. Most of them are local people telling a little story about some local person, place or event. You can hear a sampling of them at this link.

One I heard a few days ago isn't available for replaying on that link so I'm going to repeat it here from memory. Given my memory, it may be completely wrong.

It seemed like the story was being told by the wife of the man the story was about. She said that this man had been a dairy farmer all his life and had worked seven days a week year around. He'd never taken a vacation or gotten very far from his farm. Once, I forget the occasion, they took a trip to Nantucket. He had never seen the ocean before and tears filled his eyes when he saw it for the first time. He said, "This is where I want to live," and they moved there and have lived there ever since. I don't tell it as well as the woman who narrated it on the radio. But it moved me because I felt the same way when my parents took me on vacation to the North Shore of Massachusetts when I was a teenager. I'd seen the ocean before (Ocean City, MD when I was much younger) but the rugged, rocky coast of Massachusetts filled me with wonder. Even though Cape Cod is much different, I've never lost my fascination with the sea.

Next time I'll tell another story from this series that reminds me of two other stories from my own life. I'll tell those, too.