Former island teacher publishes essays about Nantucket life
BY MARY LANCASTER INDEPENDENT WRITER

Photo courtesy of ROBERT BARRSANTI

Robert Barsanti washed ashore on Nantucket in 1987, coming from Ipswich after college graduation to join the faculty at Nantucket High School as an English teacher. Though he left the island after resigning from NHS in 2004 to attend to family obligations and now teaches high school English in Pittsfield, Mass., Barsanti said the sand he got in his shoes when he came here is still in them, metaphorically.

He has published a book of essays called "Sand in My Shoes" about the Nantucket experiences he will never forget. The 27 pieces were published in Yesterday's Island between 2003 and 2006 and touch on subjects such as Nantucket's natural beauty, the people who live and visit here, what it is like to raise children on the island and his sadness about some of its qualities which are changing or disappearing.

"I wanted to reflect a little on what it was like to live year-round on Nantucket, what the island can be and the community," said Barsanti, who visits his children here at least once a month and on school vacations. "When I looked back at the essays I felt I could strengthen them and put them in another publication. A lot of what I was writing about were things I was missing - qualities of the island that were slipping away."

There is an essay on peepers and how they herald spring on the island. There is one on hiring island workers and how they need to believe in the Nantucket dream, work many overtime hours and "see their family only in pictures." He writes of ghosts and children, the youth being asked to invest their talents in the community and haunt it through protecting open space, the museums or the hospital.

Barsanti writes about seasonal traffic jams and how fortunate islanders are not to have to leave at the end of the summer and return to constant traffic snarls and crowds. He writes about fog and regulating growth and cautions about the island's out-pricing itself. In the essay called "The End of Something," he writes about the loss of the days when ice cream, tshirts and day-trippers were the stuff of the high season, yet how Nantucket has always had an "us."

"We have learned how to walk together, gone to school together, married each other, left and returned to the island. Rich or poor, young or old, we stop by for a visit, wave on the street and connect."

In "A Lover's Quarrel," Barsanti writes of the beauty of the Bershires and that there is a lot to love about the area.

"And yet, I don't. With an inward eye, I look back on the moors turning russet in Madaket, the view of the ocean from Ram's Pasture and the sight of the fog bank crossing the first hole at Miacomet. Outside, the Berkshires throws herself at me in a wanton display of color and glory, but my heart keeps crossing that vast Nantucket Sound to my old, dear friend...I know I can quarrel with her. The prices, the real estate, the development, the greed and the blind self-destruction of hedges and houses feed my fighting fire. But at the end of the day, I will still stand underneath her stars and hear the low roll of waves off to the south. I have sand in my shoes. Long may it stay."

Barsanti's book is available in local bookstores. He will be on Nantucket in August to do a reading and discuss his book at the Atheneum.