My friend David and I went to Newport a week or so ago to celebrate the first sunny day we’d had in over a week and the decidedly unofficial first day of spring. What a wonder it is to take off your coat and cast it into the back seat! To jam your gloves into the weary coat’s pockets. To feel like you’ve lost a few years, a few pounds, regained something flirtatious, fickle, alive…even if you’re wearing a sweater over a top and a skirt over jeans and walking shoes.
Newport smiled back at us with our cameras and reveled in our ooohs and aaahs at its old houses built so long ago by men with names like Jacob and Jeremiah, Silas and Samuel. These are not the mansions of Bellevue (those are a whole other story) but the simple square structures of the seafarers and their wives.
Life would be good here, I think, living in one of these crooked houses with the sea air shaking the windows in January, wafting the curtains in July. No doubt the salty ancestors of these houses rattle around the attics, closets and cellars of these houses and are frequent guests at tea or cocktail hour.
The only thing that would have made this day absolute perfection would have been a chance to go inside one of the old houses and have a good look around. Or sit in a chair by a wavery window, look out at the harbor and listen for the silent stories the old house might be inclined to tell.