When I’m asked what I miss about Cape Cod, or  when I’m not there, how do I envision it? What do I look back to? 

Sandy beaches, rippling water? Quaint cottages next to a picturesque harbor, perhaps, or great seafood, light houses, to name a few. Oh, pretty towns, old houses, yes, sea shells. . .  and the salt marshes.  

I love them all. And of course, when we’re speaking about beloved places, we all know that “What do you miss?” is a complex question with many answers. In the case of Cape Cod, along with those picturesque harbors and lovely beaches, we dream of sand, dunes, and almost plains-like areas, as well as other deciduous trees, and the unromantically named scrub oak and the modest though upright cedars. And don’t forget all the glorious fresh water ponds.   

Yet so often my Cape memories and nostalgia present visions much like this image of our Craigville cottage: a vista or place framed in or made up of leafy green trees! Deciduous trees, with linked webs of leaves, like the oaks around our cottage. Or the varied canopy you drive under on Rt. 6A in Barnstable. I love swaying frameworks of branches, love the intensity of sun shining through. The way the leaves look so green, as though a light echo waited impatiently behind every one, so saturated is the hue. All that light, that moving stained glass effect! All that generous green, a gift-of-the-summer- season-green. East coast green.  

I know it the minute I see it as my plane circles over Massachusetts before landing in Boston. It’s the green I grew up with in a Boston suburb, the trees I grew up depending on to line the streets. 

And it is also a burning green. For after the summer months, these leaves will dry out and turn orange, then rust or umbrous brown, before dropping to the ground in late fall. 

***  

Some years back, I realized the depth of this green hued-nostalgia on meeting another east coast migrant, in a chance conversation at a writing conference. Somehow Vanda and I quickly realized that we both knew the same Cape town of Eastham.  We fell into reminiscing over First Encounter Beach; how we’d both loved poking around Bee’s River and the salt marsh and riding our bikes along Herring Brook Road and swimming in the fresh, cool waters of Great Pond and Herring Pond.  

However, Vanda then revealed that she’d later spent some years in a repressive commune in the Arizona desert; until she managed to escape the place, her memories served her by offering a deep, private comfort.  

I asked, “What did you miss most?”  

“Broad leaf-ed trees!”   

Sadly, after that intense sharing of common ground (common foliage?) I never saw Vanda again. At the time, that poignant memory of hers surprised me but I understand now what she meant. Compared to the arid desert, and to the leathery, gray green of most trees around me in southern California, those east coast trees on Cape Cod are resplendent in their brightness. Vanda and I had been leaf-printed by the radiance of it, by all those green shades. 

 Here on the opposite coast, live oaks hang on; they’re considered evergreens; their leathery, tough leaves live to blow another day, as do eucalyptus, while east coast oaks verdantly display for only a season. Odd that the older, longer-settled side of the country offers that relatively brief brilliance, while the California landscape offers native trees whose leaves determinedly last.  

All my adult life, I’ve flown back and forth between “sea and shining sea.” When I travel east, in body or spirit, my eyes seek those gathered splashes of hyper-chlorophylled green. And then I always return to where the oaks hold on throughout the year.