Why would anyone want to leave Narrowsburg in the summer? It’s our season. We earn it by living through winter with its bleak, bitter cold and snow; spring with its mud; even autumn with its endless mountains of leaves and its fading light. But at the tail end of September, with pool weather abruptly ended by 50-degree nights, leave we did.

The purpose of our trip was to visit an old friend—old in all its meanings—who is succumbing to one of the dread diseases of age. Even in life’s least glorious environment, he persists. Even as his answer to my “How are you feeling?” is “Agony!” He persists. Breathing in, breathing out.

In her play about living with cancer, “Eating Companion,” Teresa Tulipano writes: “Is it avoidance or tenacity that makes me push through?… Is it love of life… or fear of the great and final darkness?” I think of this as I watch our friend on his last earthly journey.

He lived in Provincetown for his adult life, a refuge from those dark times before Stonewall, when the rest of the world, it seemed, denied Gays a way to live openly. Now, Provincetown, on the tip of Cape Cod, is Mecca to free people, free thought and the personal choice to love whomever one loves.

It’s a long journey, seven hours by car from the Upper Delaware, so one we do not make often. It had been a frequent destination when we were younger and traveled with our children to see our friend and enjoy his hospitality, sometimes all of us packed into his little apartment on Bradford Street, with its playground across the way, and its walls covered with his colorful abstract paintings and windowsills lined with cobalt glass bottles. A 50-year gathering of beach glass filled a vessel on the tiny front porch.

A trip to the Cape was the first long journey my husband and I took together over 40 years ago. I remember wondering if I could stand this man, who took note of every gasoline fill and odometer reading along the way for the rest of the journey, let alone my life. I kept him for his many other qualities.

On this trip, we stayed in an Airbnb where the decor was more corporate than our friend’s place, with art from Kohl’s on the wall and a huge TV as sentinel in the living room. No matter, as we spent most of our time outside in glorious September weather.

A cousin now lives in Truro, and we connected with him for dinner and the best bike ride of my life, so far. He is a decade or more younger than I, and fitter, so I rented an e-bike—a first for me—for our trip through the dunes from Provincetown to Race Point Beach. Exhilarating is a word that only approaches the feeling of pedaling up hills banked by scrub pine and ripe beach plums under a blue sky toward the wide Atlantic Ocean roiled by an approaching nor’easter.

As we prepared to leave, I told my husband I needed to make one stop at the Marine Hardware store in town. I’m a fan of hardware stores in general, and this is one of the very best in the category. Also, they have free parking. So with the car packed with our two schnauzers and all our earthly belongings it seemed, he agreed to wait for me. I guess he’s seen enough hardware stores in his life, however many that would be. As I waded through the aisles of waders and switches and ropes with the one item I had come to find clutched in my hand, a tall woman loomed in front of me. We stopped and I did a double-take as she widened her eyes at me. Then we passed each other without speaking, both of us knowing I had just encountered Martha Stewart in the wild.

These are the times we live for.