Ellie Slott Fisher

The beaches in Cape May, New Jersey are lined with sky blue tent-like cabanas, each one with a fairly crude piece of wood painted with the renter’s last name. These tents in one form or another have dotted Cape May beaches since Victorian days. I rented one for 30 years until the cost became prohibitive two summers ago. My late husband Charlie and I had viewed our tent neighbors as our summer friends.

In the early days, our neighbors included a beautiful middle-aged widow from Pittsburgh, Mrs. Murrow, who summered in a double-porched Victorian gem. We also met an outgoing Virginian couple – The Lawsons – and another couple – the Reddys, who had two kids a few years older than ours. But as life changes, so did our little tent neighborhood.

I may have brought the first change, returning the summer of 1991 and breaking the stunning news to my neighbors that Charlie had died less than a week after returning home the previous summer. He was 42.

Then a few years later I showed up with a new husband, and a couple years after that, I showed up with no husband.

The Reddys moved their tent to a more secluded location (hopefully having nothing to do with my dating habits). Unfortunately more tent neighbors sprung up around them. Then Mrs. Murrow stopped coming to the beach because her macular degeneration became too debilitating. However, she continues to rent a tent on the diminishing chance her adult grandkids will show up and take her to the beach. They haven’t.

And then there’s Mrs. Lawson. I remember when she and her husband would wave to Charlie and me, and then, when she too became widowed, she and I became next-door neighbors, so to speak.

Although a generation or two older than me, I was always in awe of this striking, Grace Kellyish elderly woman with blonde hair, a perpetual tan, and flamboyant costume jewelry that unfailingly matched her bathing suit. One day we discovered that we had both graduated from Lower Merion High School outside of Philadelphia.

We talked about similar childhood haunts and then she told me she had a surprise that she would bring to the beach the following day. There she was sitting in a chair under her tent, sporting a much shrunken wool sweater emblazoned with the words Lower Merion High School, each letter an individual wool appliqué, and smelling vaguely of mothballs.

Last night I returned home from Cape May, not having seen Mrs. Lawson’s name on a tent all summer. Earlier, I drove by her summer house. A “For Rent” sign stood on the lawn. By my calculations, based on the year she graduated from LM, Mrs. Lawson would be about 85. I hope she’s well.

It’s nice that I still see the Reddys – in the water as they keep watch over their grandchildren. But I miss the old neighborhood.