To Catch a Turtle

There were a lot of “usual” activities for our kids on the Cape, such as  picking blueberries, catching clams, sliding on the sand dunes, and, certainly, swimming in the bay and the Atlantic Ocean and taking a walk on the beach. Catching a turtle was an unusual activity. We did get turtles this year, so everyone wanted to take a picture with them. Here we were! You can see that everyone was excited about this unusual activity.

Plays

There was one big difference between two of the generations of young people on the Cape: our children and our grandchildren. Our children’s generation always had a play of some kind when they got together on the Cape. It could be a variation of Snow White or some other Princess and Prince story. Oh, yes, it could be very elaborate with many twists and turns! It always involved every child in the house, except for some of the older siblings who refused to be included. Some had some words to recite and some provided narrations or sang. it could be very involved and there was certainly plenty of make-up! Can you guess what kind of play they produced in the summer of 1976 from the following pictures?

Cape Cod Cabin

I call Janice’s family  house at Cape Cod a cabin, mainly because it is only used in the summer and is usually closed in the winter. It is not a cabin when you consider it’s size: four bedrooms with two baths plus dinning and living space. We have packed quite a number of people into it. There are usually more activities going on there than you might imagine. Besides swimming and walking along the beach there are always people playing croquet in the yard or Bonanza in the house! I will talk about the Cape Cod place a few times here in this blog. Our children love the place because they were always very relaxed and free of any responsibilities. There is a lot of space here with few people and houses around. The pictures below show the house, which was re-constructed after the war, over the years, by Janice’s father and friends, from an old army barracks. It faces sort-of west and has a beautiful view of the sunset on the water. The third picture I posted below was a picture with a kite on the top, which is one activity everyone has tried there and of which we never got tired. The final picture is a picture of people watching the kite flying or doing nothing, which is what we usually do when we are at the Cape house!

The Old Meet the Young

Whenever we were in the Boston area, we usually tried to see Sister Anthony at her retirement place. In 1976, she had already been retired for quite a number of years, after teaching first grade for more than half a century! She was Janice’s grandmother’s elder sister and the oldest person we knew (she was in her nineties at that time). Our kids were quite young, 7and 5, and, while they did not have much to talk about, it was very nice to see them together, old and young! Fiona Paul was with us on that trip which we made specifically to meet with Sister Anthony.