A yellow sticky note on the door outside Jan Kelly’s third-floor apartment on Alden Street reads, “My horse rides high as the devil rides by.” The sound of someone beating a drum can be heard coming from inside.

Kelly stops drumming, opens the door, and starts talking. “I don’t know if I can chat,” she says. “Isn’t that over tea, about nothing? But I can talk.”

She paid $25 for the drum at the Methodist Church thrift shop. She holds up a framed photograph and points to the house on Bradford Street where she lived for nearly half a century. “That’s my house, the largest house in town, and I bought it with no money,” she says. “It was the house at number 58-60 Bradford St., built by Flyer Santos’s grandmother.”

Kelly says that when she saw the house with a “For Sale” sign in front, she had a strong intuition about it. She describes standing in front of the place with nothing but a knapsack and a sleeping bag, “and I had the parrot in the cage,” she adds. The year was 1968. She still has the parrot, Divil. Though he’s no longer of this world: he’s in the freezer, she says.

It’s hard to name a pet you don’t kiss, says Kelly, “so I called him Rasputin. If I came home with lamb chops he’d screech until he got one. ‘You are such a divil!’ I said. That’s Irish.”

Kelly grew up in Boston. Both parents were Irish: “My father, Galway; my mother, Mayo. Galway is the best.” At night, after her family finished dinner, she and her two sisters would stand in front of the fireplace and each recite a poem. “The Irish have great memories for poetry,” she says. “Ireland is a country full of geniuses whose heads are full of useless information.”

In Provincetown, a man showed her around that Bradford Street building, including the unfinished attic that she eventually made into her own apartment. He told her he’d bought the place “on speculation,” so she offered him a year’s free rent for it, she says. He must have accepted, because Kelly stayed for 47 years before moving into her apartment at Seashore Point.

In the 1980s and ’90s, she packed all the characters of Provincetown into “Kelly’s Corner,” the column she wrote for Provincetown Magazine. And she wrote with a roving intellect about birds, a comet sighting, a neighbor recuperating from knee surgery, art openings, local families, and bits of Provincetown history.

“I wrote about what I did every day,” she says. “That’s all they wanted. That’s enough.”

She also wrote about food. She contributed to Howard Mitcham’s column in the Provincetown Advocate called “The Cape Tip Gourmet,” she says. “He did New Orleans recipes, and I did international ones.” In Issue 63 of Provincetown Magazine, she described making her own elderberry wine. “If you were to spend 15 minutes with closed doors and windows at my house, you would be mildly drunk, just for breathing,” she wrote.

Kelly has walked all over the world, “always with a sleeping bag and never in a hotel,” she says. “Travel is such a teacher.” In another issue of Provincetown Magazine Kelly wrote about how travel is good for the soul: “It brings new views, new experiences, a small bout with fantasy.” But her readers knew the place she loved best was Provincetown. “Most of us are too busy in the summer to travel, so we must be tourists in our own town,” her column continued. “Remember, these visitors all come here for a reason.”

Kelly’s mind seems to run on pure lore. She’s had a life of romantic adventure — or at least that’s the genius she projects.

“Well, I finally saw Halley’s Comet,” she wrote in 1986 in Issue 39 of Provincetown Magazine. “Much of March I was sleepy-eyed, waking at 3 a.m. and patrolling the beach and skies until daylight, sitting like a sentinel a half hour at a time … I was determined to see that elusive celestial wonder.”

Then, “There it was. What a thrill. At 11:54 p.m.,” she wrote. The way she remembers it, she heard Stormy Mayo’s voice asking, “Do you see it, Kelly?”

She did, she wrote, “even though it was not spectacular.”

No matter. Things did not have to be spectacular to make an appearance in “Kelly’s Corner.” She had a knack for making the mundane seem cinematic and touching, even.

“Adelaide Kenney stopped me on Election Day,” Kelly wrote in Issue 35. “Adelaide is civic minded and family minded, independent, yet works well with others. We’re lucky to have her. When you see her, why don’t you tell her so?

“Did you know you could pay your light bill at the Cape End Pharmacy on Shank Painter Road? Not only can you save a check and a stamp, but you can meet the handsome pharmacist, Allan Robinson, and the very smiley Carolyn Pereira. They are always ready for banter, for jokes, or for any fun to push their cloud up one more notch.”

If you’ve been in Provincetown for a few years, you probably remember Kelly as the woman who rode around town on a bicycle, its basket overflowing with plastic flowers. “Did you know my bicycle?” she asks. “I gave it to the AIDS benefit. I wore all white and rode it down the center aisle of town hall.” Kelly named her bike Our Lady of Perpetual Poinsettias.

Were those flowers real? “Shh … They might be listening to you,” she says. She did occasionally find real flowers in the cemetery — but only after a windstorm, she says.

Kelly has always had an eye for romance, and romance has kept a close eye on her. She has been the muse of countless Provincetown painters, she says, showing a visitor several portraits by friends and one by a boyfriend she met on a boat to Paris, where she went to study when she was 20 — before she came to Provincetown.

“Speaking of Ireland,” Kelly says, holding out a clod of dirt, “this is peat. It would become coal if you left it in the ground. My father brought that when he came over from Galway.

“If you left Provincetown you’d land in Galway,” she says. “It’s on the edge of the ocean, like Provincetown. The Vikings landed in Galway. That’s why there are redheads there. The Spanish fleet crashed there in a storm. When I’m out on the pier, next stop: Galway.”