In the winter, my island world, small to begin with, shrinks considerably. I’ve worn a path down Surfside Road, between town and home.

Stories in the natural world have no true beginnings or endings. In writing about them, we choose a place to start and a place to end, knowing that nature continues to write the story long after we have abandoned it.

My friend Ralph – as I’ve mentioned before on these broadcasts, has an uncanny eye for unusual things that most of us would overlook. But he outdid himself the other day when he showed me a picture he had taken of something that had washed up on the beach in Harwichport.

For all who welcome solar and wind as our energy future, the past proves that futuristic, breakthrough innovations can harken back centuries.

A few weekends ago, word got out that there was a shipwreck down on the South Shore. A man walking had posted a photo online, a few slanting poles in the sand the only indicator of exactly where on Nantucket’s 80 miles of coastline this shipwreck sat.

My father was a resourceful man. He had to be. He was the youngest in a family of seven. His father died when he was eleven, and he had to quit school to help support his family.

When I was a kid, my friend Jimmy and I would go to the Saturday morning matinee at the local movie theater. The main feature, usually a Western, was preceded by a short chapter from an adventure serial. Usually, each chapter would end on a cliff-hanger, sometimes a literal one, and we would have to wait to the following week to learn the fate of the hero.

The beach is greedy.The surf eats the sand. The wind carves out the dunes. The tide sucks shoes, hats, and iPhones out to sea.

The other week, I spent a few days with my five-year-old nephew and his parents in Truro. It was a trip we’d looked forward to all summer.

One of my favorite Jerry Seinfeld moments is not from his hugely successful TV series, but from a documentary entitled Comedian, which follows Jerry’s career after Seinfeld had ended.