Massachusetts state outline on ribs

The rain has been coming sideways across the Faneuil end of the market since Tuesday, and I have sold nothing but a tin of clam chowder and a bent umbrella to a man who said he was from Ohio and wanted to know where the Cape began. I drew it for him on the back of a paper bag, the way Pa taught me. The bulge of the east, the hook, the little scatter of islands dropped like crumbs off the elbow. He folded the bag into his coat and said it looked like a lobster that had given up. I told him that was the most accurate thing anyone had said about it all year.

Pa's chart is still pinned above the till, the one with the coastline inked in fountain pen and the soundings in pencil so faint you have to tilt your head. Every spring he added a new pencil mark where the sand had moved at Chatham. The sea takes a bit more of the elbow each winter, he used to say, and gives it back somewhere else. I thought for years he was only talking about maps.

Yesterday a girl came by with a battered paperback of Moby-Dick and asked whether the outline was wrong on the western border, because it did not match the atlas at her school. I laughed so hard I knocked the tin off the table. The line is right, I told her. It is the coast that keeps moving.

I am sending you a sheet of the outline, pressed flat in tissue, so you can see it is not a lobster at all, whatever Ohio thinks. Come home at Easter. The stall will still be here, and so will the rain.

Love, Mags