MARGARET KNIGHT

508-627-8894

(margaret02539@yahoo.com)

Traditionally, September is harvest time, and we’ve been busy preserving the island’s bounty at my house. The gnarled apple trees that were old when I started building my house 35 years ago have produced a huge crop of small apples this year, as opposed to other years when there was a small crop of tiny apples. We’ve cooked them with some wild pears and apples from a couple of other Chappy apple trees to make applesauce and apple butter. It’s a fine domestic science trying to get the perfect mix for the best tasting applesauce, sweet but with just enough tartness. My favorite batch included the sweet, pear-flavored apples from our backyard tree mixed with some wild pears and some crab apples I picked at a friend’s place in Maine.

It’s been another good year for beach plums, although they are mostly past by now except for a few of the later bushes. The wild grapes are plentiful as well — all waiting to be harvested by enterprising people.

The Chappy farmers’ market is finished for the season. This was the second year that the community center has sponsored a weekly market at which island growers have been able to sell the extra vegetables from their home gardens. Six or seven people sold produce at different times over the season, with Jack and Sharlee Livingston and Will and Sue Geresy as the mainstays of the market. They appeared each week with whatever was in season. Some customers were ready for tomatoes before they were ripe (as were the growers themselves), or looking for vegetables that no one had, but generally people were glad to be able to buy some fresh — and organic — vegetables without leaving the island. Lily Morris also sold her Chappy photo cards at the market, and next year, the community center hopes more people will sell their local crafts as well as vegetables.

Mary Spencer took on the huge job of organizing all the volunteers for the 2008 Martha’s Vineyard International Film Festival, a four-day extravaganza of films at three locations in downtown Vineyard Haven last Thursday through Sunday. Sidney and I spent some time ushering and collecting tickets, and saw some of the other Chappy volunteers who included Anne Heywood, Laura Jemison, Pat Rose, John Ortman, Peggy Pinney, Paul Cardello and Judy Buss. Mary did an amazing job of helping to make the whole festival run smoothly.

One of the films we saw, Flow, was about the politics of water as a resource. It’s a film worth seeing when you get a chance. It gives a clear picture of how water sources around the world are being treated as commodities to be bought and sold by a few international corporations, and water’s future as a world shortage far exceeding that of oil.

Next weekend, Sept. 27 and 28, Mary Spencer and the directors of the film festival will host two days of free thank-you screenings at the Chappy Community Center for volunteers who assisted with the festival. Films screened will be chosen from among those shown at the festival. As a thank-you for the use of the center, Mary and the volunteers extend an open invitation to any Chappy residents who would like to attend the screenings. A list of films to be screened and a screening schedule will be posted at the center and the ferry, or you may call Mary for information at 508-627-4011.

The community center potlucks have started up again. The dinners are the first and third Wednesdays of the month, starting at 6 p.m. for appetizers and 6:30 for dinner. Dawn and Victor Colantonio were the first hosts of the season this past Wednesday. Donna Kelly will host the next potluck on Oct. 1. The dinners are open to all; just bring a dish with approximately enough food to feed yourselves and six other people. The host takes care of the appetizers and something to drink, so any main or side dish, salad, or dessert is fine to bring.

Geof and Norma Kontje just returned from a 6,000-mile-trip across country. They went in their van that Geof had converted to a camper. Norma said they had great weather and saw so much of the country. The trip also was a celebration of their first wedding anniversary.

Capt. Bob told me he’d seen several squad cars, including some unmarked police cars, coming over to the island last weekend. Rumor has it that a recently sold house on Menaca Hill, marked for tear down, was used as a practice site for an Island SWAT (Special Weapons And Tactics) team practice. Evidently one of the neighbors, who probably wasn’t expecting a SWAT team on Chappy, became concerned by the noise of windows breaking and shouting, and reported the event.

I don’t know if we’ll ever need a SWAT team to deal with this, but the Chappy ferry did run into several cases of counterfeit tickets this past summer. The observant deck hands noticed the tickets right away. Peter showed me one counterfeit ticket that looked so much like the real ones that it took me awhile to be able to see the difference. Although the ticket paper color and print has varied somewhat over the years, DaRosa’s, who has always printed the tickets, told Peter that the ones in question had never been printed there. Peter talked to the police, whom he said would have been glad to prosecute, but decided he didn’t want to spend the time or money to do so.

Despite complaints about high ticket prices, I think most people have appreciated how well the ferries ran all summer. Many thanks to Peter and Sally and all of the ferry captains and crew for their hard work and care of us all during the busy months.

And thanks to Jo-Ann Tilghman who wrote the column this summer and kept us all so well informed. She and Tom will be heading back to Florida in another couple of weeks.