A gauzy blanket of heat settled over the Island last week and then a little like the latest round of house guests, decided to stay for awhile. It’s not been dangerously hot and stifling like in New York city, but thick, humid air and blazing sunshine is driving vacationers to the shore, where cool water for swimming and ocean breezes beckon. In town villages air conditioners are humming and ice cream shops are doing a brisk business. Did someone declare this the summer of the cone? Forget the waistline, make ours a double scoop.

Tomorrow July gives way to August. It used to be called changeover weekend, when the July people left and August people arrived. But the lines of summer are not drawn so clearly anymore. This year July has felt like August with traffic jams, ferries packed to the gunwales and tempers sometimes flaring, as so many people try to share the same hundred square-mile patch of Island. With a national economy on the rebound and the Vineyard apparently more popular than ever, August is shaping up to be just as busy. That’s good news for the year-round businesses who depend on ten to twelve short weeks a year of brisk commerce to stay in the black and keep their employees on the payroll through the long, lean months that inevitably lie ahead.

Still, it’s hard to remember that when there’s little relief from crowds and heat and just going to the post office or the grocery store is enough to try the patience of a Buddhist monk. An escape to a hushed woodland can be a good antidote. Sadly, the high bush blueberries are scarce this year, eclipsed by their delicious but hard-to-pick low bush counterparts lurking in the gorse. The August report on blackberries has not come in yet, although already the forecast for beach plums and apples is looking good.

But that’s getting ahead of things.

Still to come is August, with its fresh round of summer fundraising galas, dusty fair grounds, Grand Illumination, vacationing presidents, Perseids in the inky night sky and fireworks over Ocean Park. In 1951, former Gazette editor Henry Hough wrote:

“Now the shift to August.

“Heavy green leaves hang darkly on the tall trees, the air is an infusion of summer smells, the cicada sets the hottest days to a sort of music, the southwest wind is a warm breath, the salt water stretches out blue and basking under a blue sky — by tokens such as these one knows that August has come. August is passing by again, its peaceful days of maturity and plenty pretending to show us the essence of eternity, yet treading fast upon one another’s heels. In a month when nature is replete and content, and seems to have no thought for any other sort of future, it is ironic that time, the one restless element remaining, should speed so fast.

“ . . . . Let the days sizzle and stew, and let the nights be all clear for the Milky Way and, now and then, the Northern Lights. Come one and all, take summer by the hand and swim in a warm sea, bask in sunlight, invade the shadowy aisles of the woods, and rejoice.”