SWIMMING AT SUPPERTIME: Seasons of Delight on the Wrong Side of Buzzard's Bay

"Except for the crickets, there is exquisite silence here in the bright weeks after everyone goes home," Wasserman writes in this touching memoir of life as a year-rounder in salty, fog-blown Weweantic, Mass. Her village is on the mainland, across the bay from Cape Cod, "on the wrong side of Buzzard's Bay"—a place where "no one thinks themselves above those who collect empties to earn a couple of bucks." Bypassed by an interstate that links the mainland to the Cape, Weweantic still has some summer people and new settlers, who Wasserman makes gentle fun of. They are "The People Who Moved Here by Mistake"—the well-to-do city folk from, say, Cambridge, who want to remake the town into a smaller version of that hip, intellectual community. But the recently widowed Wasserman and her friends, like the majority of the townspeople, are poor, making a living as carpenters, house cleaners, grocery baggers and babysitters. Hard times come after the season: some young families spend the winter in a cheap rental cottage unequipped for the squalls that blow across the bay. Despite the hardships, Wasserman, who has told some of these stories on NPR's All Things Considered, doesn't overlook the pleasures of smalltown life. Her inviting descriptions of buying local peaches from a hungover farmer, the fun of block dances and her patriotic feelings as she marches in the Memorial Day parade help her poignant tales serve as metaphors for the life lessons she has learned through bittersweet experience. (Apr.)