The Way It Used to Was: Memories of a Cape Cod Childhood 1924-1942

Barbara Chase Palson spent her childhood summers in West Harwich, Cape Cod, Massachusetts in an 18th century half-house that had been in her father’s family for nearly 200 years. In this collection of memories, she invites the reader to return to the Cape of her childhood, when working farms and scrub woods dominated the landscape, when the daily mail delivery was a social occasion, when it was still possible to live off the land and sea. Through her series of vignettes filled with small-town charm she introduces the reader to a Cape Cod before developers and tourists, ‘the way it used to was.’