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"A Sunday in Newburyport" is a quiet yet emotionally resonant story that captures the beauty of enduring love, the comfort of tradition, and the poignancy of memory. It invites readers to slow down and consider how ordinary days and simple objects can be layered with profound significance. Through the lens of one couple’s journey into an antique store, we’re reminded that the past is never entirely gone—it lives on in stories, in relationships, and in the quiet moments we choose to remember.

The title situates the story in a specific place and moment: Newburyport, Massachusetts, on a tranquil Sunday. This setting, steeped in both natural and historical ambiance, immediately evokes a sense of nostalgia and calm. The antique shop and its surrounding elements (boardwalk, Merrimack River, colonial town streets) serve as a physical and emotional gateway into memory, history, and reflection.

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A Sunday in Newburyport

By Harry Arabian

It was a Sunday stitched together with sunlight and tradition. The kind of morning we had lived dozens of times before but cherished like it was the first: our breakfast ritual of sweet potato hash mixed with creamy crumbles of feta and a softly poached egg, a slice of banana walnut bread still warm from the oven, and a bottomless pour of dark, robust coffee in our favorite old diner, where the waitstaff knew us just well enough to smile but not interrupt.

Afterwards, we took our usual pilgrimage to the Newburyport boardwalk, drawn by the quiet glimmer of the Merrimack River and the simple pleasure of wandering. That day, the air held a particular clarity, the kind that seems to slow down time. Fishing boats bobbed at the docks, gulls circled in lazy arcs overhead, and the scent of salt and tar lingered on the breeze.

Marie held my hand as we strolled along Merrimack Street, heading toward the antique row—a line of shops crowded with relics from lives long lived. We weren’t looking for anything in particular. That was never the point. It was the feeling of brushing fingertips against history, the marvel of discovering some forgotten tool or oddity and wondering who had once held it, what story it carried in silence.

At the corner of Water and Merrimack Streets, we reached the largest of the antique stores, the one that felt more like a museum than a place of commerce. The windows were crowded with maritime treasures: old sextants, yellowed maps with frayed edges, life rings emblazoned with names of ships that had long since vanished from the registry. Inside, the place was a maze of time—cast iron cookware stacked beside copper kettles, wooden ladles, butter churns, and thick rolling pins that looked like they’d survived a century of pie crusts.

We wandered slowly, our conversation light but meaningful. Marie picked up a rusty hook from a display near the back and said with delight, “Look—pothooks. We could use these in our kitchen.”

I leaned in and examined it. “Looks like a trammel, actually. Colonial cooking tool. Used to hang pots over a fire and adjust their height.”

She turned to me with mock surprise. “How do you know that? Did you learn it on Patriots’ Day in Concord—when you wore that ridiculous colonial hat?”

I laughed, remembering the moment—how earnest I must have looked in that tricorne, peering at reenactors over the rim of a hot cider. “Close. Remember our last trip to Mohegan Sun? On the way back, we stopped at Mystic Harbor. The Maritime Museum had a display on colonial kitchens. That’s where I read about trammels.”

Her expression softened. “I don’t remember much from that day. I was mourning… everything, really. I didn’t know you were into cooking.”

The air shifted then—not heavy, but quieter. More reverent. We stood for a moment in the dusty stillness of the shop, surrounded by artifacts once essential to daily life, now orphaned curiosities. I looked at Marie and saw, as I always did, the layers of joy and grief that composed her. And perhaps she saw the same in me.

“Maybe I’m not into cooking,” I said. “Maybe I’m just into the past. Into stories. Into you.”

She smiled, brushing her fingers over a wooden spoon as if touching memory itself. “Then let’s keep collecting. One story at a time.”

We left the store without buying a thing. But we carried with us a trammel-shaped piece of history and a shared reverence for what remains, even when time has moved on.