Special Feature
OUR TOWN Laughter in the Sand RACHEL ELIZA GRIFFITHS
It is not strange for me to think of Provincetown as a place where, during my visits, I am mostly offshore. There is the initial sense of the mind narrowing to that single road I first encountered years ago in 2006 and the way a journey will continue through you as a vein does, narrowing and expanding in tandem with breathing when your body feels itself to be free and safe. In Provincetown, my breathing changes. My mind and body erupt with wonder and freedom. I become a mass of senses, endowed with weight and ease, not unlike my most beloved companions, which are the humpbacks in summer. For nearly fifteen years, I’ve sailed on different vessels each summer to listen to their songs and to the song of my heart that is inaudible on land. During this journey, which is spiritual for me, the sight of each lighthouse fills me with a solace that is part of the joy I will store in my body to endure winters and my lives elsewhere. Going out on the water the intensity of this joy forms a harbor in me. I was in my twenties when I first arrived, on a scholarship residency, to the Work Center. Immediately, Provincetown felt like “home,” and the formality of being a resident or guest was replaced by my certainty that I was an artist and that I would live amongst artists. These artists dazzled me with their gardens, their gallery windows and open studios, their worship of jowly, well-dressed bulldogs, their voices singing a cappella in perfect soprano while roller-skating down Commercial Street for no reason except joy, and that famous unabashed cheekiness, that encouraged me to give serious thought to how delight, fellowship, and pleasure were part of the poet’s calling. Now, in my forties, I can point to benches or trees along Commercial Street where I once dreamt, curled up in love or in my own tears, and how some bear in a mermaid costume might blow me a kiss and shout one word like “Beautiful” or “Honey, that bitch doesn’t deserve you!” I hear my footfall on the rocks in the courtyard of the Work Center and remember how I once sat in the cool night sand and watched the moon with sister poets, Natalie, Brenda, and Robin after we danced to Marianne Faithfull at Kate and Urvashi’s. How we women could love ourselves so brilliantly and viscerally. That evening was a marvelous feast as are so many of my memories of friendships in Provincetown. I’ve left some of my laughter there in the sand. 54 | provincetownartguide.com
