It’s all blue skies on the first day of school. So find direction, take sail. Learn to fly. Go to the moon. On the first day of school, anything is possible.
On the first day of school, time moves forward unlike any other day of the year. Every child, teacher, and parent knows that. Everyone else knows this as well. The first day of school is different.
On Cape Cod, everything changes on the first day of school. Actually, the day signals a change in whole American psyche. We all know the feeling.
Even if you last attended school decades ago, you remember the feeling. You couldn’t wait to see your friends after a long summer. You wondered if your new teacher would be nice or mean. And if you were moving up to a new school, not just a new grade….well that was something else to anticipate with both fear and wonder.
No matter your age, no matter where you live in America, life feels different on the first day of school. Even if the remnants of anticipating seeing your friends, or worrying about the teacher you heard is mean have faded, you’ll still see the yellow school buses and something inside you will instantly know. Maybe you don’t even want to know, but you’ll know.
Summer has ended.
Things have become a bit more serious. For the students, and perhaps for you.
Or, more likely, if you work on Cape Cod, it’s finally time to take a bit of a breather. Not a big breather, because fall is still huge around here. Many say it’s Cape Cod’s best season. Whatever you believe on that, you know that things have fundamentally changed here as of today – the first day of school in most communities on the Cape.
It’s also the first day of school in many other places as well.
So on Cape Cod, the first day of school means that all the kids from Boston, Connecticut, New York, and everywhere else have gone home, along with their family… and their family car.
— Cape Cod Wave
