Labor Day itself is still summer. By Tuesday morning the island is somewhere else — and the version that begins this week is the one most owners were picturing when they decided to buy here.
The turn happens on a Tuesday
Labor Day itself is still summer. The ferries are full in the wrong direction, the last of the August houses are being closed up, and Main Street on Monday night looks much as it did in July.
Then Tuesday morning arrives, and the island is somewhere else.
You notice it first in small ways. A parking space on Federal Street at ten in the morning. The line at the coffee counter is four people, and you know two of them. The bike path out to Madaket has room on it. The beach at Steps has a dozen people on it at noon, most of them in the water, because the water is the best it has been all year.
I have lived through a good many of these Tuesdays, and I have stopped being surprised by how complete the change is. What I have not stopped doing is telling people about it, because the version of Nantucket that begins this week is the one most of my clients were picturing when they decided they wanted a house here. They just did not know it had a date.
The water is still August
The Atlantic keeps its own calendar. It warms slowly through the summer and it cools slowly after, which means the ocean around the island is often at its most swimmable in the first weeks of September, long after the crowds who came for it have gone home.
So the week after Labor Day is a swimming week. The south shore is open and the surf is generally kinder than it was in August. The harbor beaches are quiet enough that you can hear the halyards. Children’s Beach still has yoga on the bandstand at half past seven every morning through Saturday, and the people on the mats are mostly people who live here.
This is also the week the Nantucket Inshore Classic gets properly underway. The tournament runs from the first weekend of September into the second week of October, catch and release, from boat or beach, for striped bass, bluefish, bonito and false albacore. It has been going for more than two decades and it is the clearest sign that a whole population of the island has been waiting for the water to empty out so they can get back on it.
What is actually on this week
September is not the off-season. It is a different season, with its own calendar, and this week’s is a good one.
On Saturday the 12th the Artists Association holds its Sidewalk Art Show on the Dreamland patio, from nine in the morning until one. It has been held since 1930 and is the oldest show of its kind in the country. It is free, it is on the sidewalk, and it is the best hour of the week to meet the people who have spent the summer painting the place you are standing in.
On Thursday the 10th, Theatre Workshop of Nantucket opens The Mousetrap at Bennett Hall, and it runs through the 26th. If you have never seen a play here in the shoulder season, when half the audience knows the other half, it is worth the ticket for the room alone.
On Wednesday the 9th, the third annual Nantucket Climate Change Summit meets at Great Harbor Yacht Club from half past four. It is free, it is put on by the Conservation Foundation and the Linda Loring Nature Foundation, and if you own a house anywhere near the water on this island, it is the most useful two hours you will spend this month. I have written about erosion and flood zones elsewhere on this site. The people presenting on Wednesday are the ones doing the fieldwork.
And on Friday evening the 11th, Egan Maritime and the Cottage Hospital hold Lifesavers Recognition Day out at the Shipwreck and Lifesaving Museum on Polpis Road, honoring the islanders who did something brave this year. It is free and it is the kind of evening that reminds you this is a town and not a resort.
Around all of that, the ordinary September week: the Preservation Trust walks Main Street on Tuesday afternoon and ’Sconset on Thursday, the Linda Loring people are banding birds at Eel Point on Thursday morning, Bartlett’s pours wine and cheese on Friday afternoon, and the farmers market is at Cambridge and North Union on Saturday morning with the tomatoes finally at their best. The full week is on our What’s On page, updated every Sunday.
The light
I hesitate to write about light because everyone who writes about this island does, and most of it is filler. But September’s light is a fact, not an adjective, and it changes how the place looks.
The sun is lower. The shadows on the shingles are longer by mid-afternoon. The moors are beginning to turn, which by the end of the month will be a serious event and right now is a rumor of rust in the huckleberry. The evenings are cool enough that people light fires and warm enough that they sit outside next to them.
If you have only seen your street in July, come and look at it in September. It is the same street, and it is not.
Why this matters if you own here, or want to
Here is the practical version of all this.
The island in September shows you the house honestly. In August a house is carried by the season, by the fact that everyone is happy and the sun is out and nobody is looking at the gutters. In September you can hear the road. You can see how the light comes into the kitchen at five o’clock. You can tell whether a place is a summer instrument or a house you would actually want to be in on a Wednesday in October. I have made this argument before about the off-season, and September is where it starts.
It is also, candidly, the start of storm season on the Atlantic, and an owned house has a plan for that. I wrote about what owners do when the forecast turns a couple of weeks ago. The week after Labor Day is a good week to check the plan, while the weather is still kind.
For buyers, this is the week the market turns over. The houses that did not sell in summer are deciding what to do next, and the sellers who stay on after Labor Day tend to be the ones who mean it. I went through that in some detail in the piece on what happens to the listings that do not sell by Labor Day, and nothing about the past two weeks has changed the argument.
But I would not want the market to be the reason you read this. The reason is simpler. If you are on the island this week, or can be, you are about to see the version of it that people who live here privately consider the best one. Go swimming. Go to the art show. Buy the tomatoes. The rest can wait until Monday.
If you would like to see a house in the light it will actually live in, September is the month to do it, and I am glad to walk you through one.