Winter isn’t my season. It portends death. But it’s also the season of my birth: the beginning of my cycle. I’ve always held that duality. And probably always will.

Last week Provincetown flooded. A coastal storm surge, combined with an astronomically high tide and a killer East wind, brought the water higher than I’d ever seen. My neighborhood is relatively high ground, so the water only came to the edge of calamity. The West End wasn’t so lucky. It was a predictive storm: climate’s future. The tideline mapped where the sea will next claim this town. Provincetown’s end is imaginable within my lifetime.

That’s dark.

Rewind.

A radical reshaping of this place will happen in my lifetime.

Which is a kind of ending, but also a beginning. Like a birthday.