Resident

An old man's cottage on the sand, down off Bacon Street, has a yard of lawn and a pink geranium hedge. They grow and bloom in a three-inch layer of reddish dirt that he has hauled there and spread out on his hands and knees. He lives alone, watching the years' high-water marks advance across the beach, chasing the seagulls out of his garden, befriending the swimmers.

After each summer day, after ten hours of sun-glare from the hot, white sand, he sits in an old rocker on the porch and sips lemonade and inhales the coolness of his green backyard and watches the sun dissolve into amber fire and pearl grey smoke along the horizon.