HOLLY NADLER

508-274-2329

(hollynadler@gmail.com)

Summer is like that guest who takes a harrowingly long time to leave. He’ll empty his pockets out on the table, locate his keys, then put everything back, only to announce five minutes later that he can’t find his keys. And it’s true: He empties out the same pockets and the keys are missing. Then he finds them — somehow they’ve plopped to the bottom of your aquarium — but as he bends over to extricate them, your Siamese fighting fish reminds him of the sand shark that ripped into his calf while he was surfing down in Honduras, and the story goes on; he’s as long-winded as those brandy-soaked narrators in old Joseph Conrad stories. Eventually you offer him a bed, since everyone who lives in your house is heading to his and hers, but to his credit he demurs and announces he’s off to his next engagement of the evening, at which point you’re tempted to ask who it is he intends to see so you can call ahead and warn them to bar the windows and doors.

So some Vineyarders proclaim the summer is over on that first August day when a cool front has moved in. Dry air and a soft extension of blue and gold light fills us with a combined longing and dread; a sort of bittersweet, vaguely bipolar aesthetic. Yeah, for sure, no day in July has ever felt like that: Summer is so over, or about to be.

Others gauge summer’s end by reductions in traffic. That last week in August certainly feels as though most of the shiny and high-tech cars, for which people have paid more than a thousand dollars, are shipping out. Same with the walking crowds, though there are still enough pedestrians, most of them slow-moving and made still more sluggish by faces stuck in ice cream cones, for any one of us to make a brisk run of errands up and down Circuit.

For many of us, however, we judge summer to be over on the day or night that we find an 87th way to prepare the last of the zucchinis we’ve been given from friends’ gardens. I know I’m not the first Islander to complain in print about this over-zucchini-ed situation, but it is a problem: we’re New Englanders, so we hate to waste anything (there’s nothing more guilt-provoking than a vegetable that’s turned to a soggy, smelly, unidentifiable object in a plastic bag), and the green-thumbed among us produce way more zucchinis than anyone has ever needed in a home kitchen. Plus they wait for them to get Ag Fair blue-ribbon huge before they present them to you, so now you’re stuck with half a dozen elephant-trunk-sized zuchs which, if you stuffed and baked them would feed whole villages in West Africa.

A quick pause for a favorite Island joke, which perhaps one or two or you have never heard: Why do Islanders keep their car doors locked and windows rolled up in August? Answer: So no one will leave zucchinis in them.

Anyway, I thought I was dispatching the last baseball-bat-sized zucchini the other night when I planned to use it in a great old family recipe called Zucchini Crescent Pie with eggs — a Julia Child’s deployment of butter, mozzarella, four cups of sliced zuchs, and refrigerated Pillsbury muffins flattened out in a pie tin — to support the impression I’d been up to my elbows in flour and rolling pins all afternoon.

Well, four flipping cups of chopped zucchinis barely used up the top third of the big fat vegetable whose flesh is as dense as poured concrete. The remaining zuch had to be used two more times, once cut up and sauteed in a leftover Middle Eastern rice dish, and finally quartered, sliced and steamed and served with a splash of olive oil — in other words, a vegie served the healthy way, with one’s attention trained on vitamins and minerals, all of this piety motivated by thoughts of the raspberry and caramel-brickle ice cream in the freezer.

In any event, this last healthy helping of zucchini was eaten in my kitchen on September 21st, the day that marks the true, chronological calendar end of summer, and, man, am I relieved! For anyone still burdened by the last of their zucchini harvest, feel free to e-mail me for the Zucchini Crescent Pie recipe.

Here’s some fun news: the Martha’s Vineyard Garden Club has handed out beautification awards to the following O.B. businesses: Dragonfly Gallery, Green-Eyed Daisy, Jimmy Seas, Madison Inn, Sanctuary and Circuit House.

On Oct. 1 from 6 to 7:45 p.m., the Oak Bluffs Public Library will be showing, on its glitzy large screen in the meeting room, a recent movie starring Jamie Foxx and Robert Downy Jr. about a homeless street musician. Are you kidding me?! I’ve wanted to see this movie ever since I caught the trailer and read some great reviews. I don’t even remember the title of the movie (which is just as well since the library is lawfully barred from naming it in print), but catching this flick is way up there on the Must Do list which, as we Islanders well know, too frequently crosses over to the Will Never Do column. But not this time, buddy!

Per the Oak Bluffs School, the next hot event is the Eighth Grade Auction taking place Sept. 27 at 5:30 at the Sand Bar Grill down along the wharfs. What a fun spot for raising money to offload our 14-year-olds for the weekend!