The rhythm of spring in the Hamptons
Spring comes late to the Hamptons. I am not sure why and maybe someday I will research it. But we all can see that it is late, two weeks or so behind the metro area, behind Nassau County and even behind western Suffolk. (Herein is perhaps another justification for forming Peconic County, but not a reason I expect would be persuasive in the state assembly in Albany.)
We are taught to judge spring botanically. Our instincts also tell to gauge spring this way also. And surely they are right. Who can resist just a frisson of hope and anticipation when the first crocus and snowflowers are blooming? After these modest signposts of spring the daffodils seem absolutely brash, brazen and emboldened in their numbers, unapologetic in their clear yellow trumpet shapes. But lovely as this floral sequence may be, there is something just a bit copycat. It’s all happened already some miles west of here, with the suburbs in the lead, for heaven sake. And all those scrub oaks growing on the moraine, they have hardly begun to acknowledge the change in the season.
For me, springtime in the Hamptons moves at a different rhythm, less a part of the natural world but emphatically a part of life here. Up and down the Main Streets of the villages, shops are reawakening. Some have closed for a few months; others have sluggishly remained open all winter. Now, when buds are peeking out of the cruel earth in Westchester, and New Jersey is garishly yellow in forsythia, the shops on Job’s Lane and Newtown Lane are being painted and refurbished. Corrugated cardboard cartons are conveyed off United Parcel trucks, inventories are being stocked, and help wanted signs embellish the windows.
I love the rituals of spring, foremost among them, getting my beach permit. Like one of the great cycles of nature it is constant, predictable, immutable, bigger than I am, bigger even than the powers in Village Hall. I am submissive before its majesty. Even after decades of paying my taxes, I still come humbly, application in hand, proof of residency drifting over me like a halo, hoping the sticker is a good color this year and that I will be early enough for a low number. For the past few years we have been instructed to put the sticker on rear driver side window. Until this revisionism took hold, we put parking decals on the rear bumper, which is the most logical place. And they never came off, come heaven or hell or hurricanes and floods. In those days when we kept cars for a number of years, either out of habit or financial necessity, I used to line my stickers up on the bumper year after year, right to left, the symbols of my village, the totems of my life. The sight reassured me that I too am a part of that great cycle of nature.
I have always liked the changes in the seasons here. I like the climatic changes and I like the social changes. I think it is perfectly respectable to semi-hibernate in the winter, to pretend you are a bear and take a good long nap. I like making up for that in the summer, when (like it or not) the crowds are here, the restaurants are impossible and you have to be a triage expert to decide which parties to attend and which to scorn. So now I look ahead – to a wonderful summer starting with Planned Parenthood and the Pollock-Krasner House benefits and ending with the Hampton Classic. Then the Hamptons International Film Festival in October. And then another change in the season.