MARGARET KNIGHT
508-627-8894
This is a great time of year for enjoying the Chappy roadsides. Many of the wild bushes and vines are in bloom. Whether or not there are beach plums at the end of summer, the beach plum bushes are always covered with showy white blossoms as if they mean to produce a bumper crop. The ubiquitous honeysuckle gives a sweet scent to the air now. Honeysuckle loves the edges of the roads and paths, and it’s one of the invasive species, along with bittersweet, that weave together the brush at the edges. The autumn olive (which I used to call Russian olive) is starting to bloom, as are the beach roses — very early this season!
It always seems like a special time of year when the lilacs come into bloom, which they are now. In the early spring, I check to see if my lilac bush has any blossoms in the making. For many years it didn’t bloom, probably because it didn’t get enough sun. It’s shaded by an oak and a shad, neither of which I want to cut down. I should have moved the lilacs years ago, but instead I cut off a branch of the oak and shad every now and then to let in a little more light. Tillie and Gladys Jeffers gave me the lilacs nearly 30 years ago as suckers from a beautiful old hedge in front of their farm house. I keep thinking I’ll take some suckers from my bushes and get them started somewhere else sunnier, but that hasn’t happened yet.
The local osprey have returned and can be seen carrying out their spring tasks. The pair who inhabit the pole along the road to my house are busy nesting, with the female usually sitting on the eggs, and the male often seen on a branch at the top of a dead tree overlooking Cape Pogue Pond.
Last Thursday, the Chappaquiddick firefighters hosted the Edgartown Firemen’s Association dinner at our firehouse. Thirty-one came to the monthly dinner, which is hosted by each fire truck’s crew in rotation. Although we have two trucks on Chappy, we have one captain for both — Peter Wells. The two lieutenants, Skip Bettencourt and Harold Zadeh, share the work of the two trucks, along with the rest of the crew. At the dinner, the firefighters awarded three scholarships from their scholarship fund, to which 13 students had applied.
On Sunday, May 23, the Chappy firefighters will put out memorial flags for former firefighters whose graves are located in the Chappy cemetery. The Chappy firefighters’ kids generally come to help put up the flags, and anyone else is welcome as well.
The next potluck at the community center will be on Wednesday, May 19, and Bob and Marvene O’Rourke will be the hosts. Appetizers start at 6 p.m. and dinner at 6:30. All are welcome. Annie Heywood hosted the last potluck on May 5, and now she’s getting ready for her trip to Greece later this month.
Two community forums will be held to consider the Island’s most pressing health needs, and anyone interested is invited to attend. State regulations demand that the hospital gives a percentage of the total cost of the new building to the community for health initiatives. The forum on Tuesday, May 18 will be held at the Howes House in West Tisbury, from 7 to 8:30 p.m. On Thursday, May 20, a forum will be held at the Vineyard Haven library from 7 to 8:30 p.m. Anyone who cannot attend but wants to participate can go online and fill out a brief community health needs survey. The link to the survey is: surveymonkey.com/s/M7KR3D2, and in Portuguese is: surveymonkey.com/s/MCPLRKM. For more information, call Dedie Wieler at 508-693-0410, extension 203.
It was nice to come back to the island after seeing the sights in the Pacific northwest. The rocky coast, the huge snow-capped mountains, and the giant trees out there are spectacular, but somehow I do better with the scale of things on this little sand pile in the Atlantic.
Sidney and I saw two Chappaquiddickers on our trip. Gabrielle Knight is making Portland, Ore., her home now. She is enjoying life in the city, with great parks not far from her apartment, lots of interesting restaurants, and a huge farmers’ market. She was hoping the clouds would clear so we could see Mt. Hood rising beyond the city, but they never did — but it doesn’t rain there all the time!
Nika Slade is at school in Bellingham, Wash., studying environmental sciences. She was in the midst of studying for midterms, but had time for dinner with us. She says she won’t be back to the island this summer, but we wish she’d change her mind.
We visited Vancouver Island, and took a freight/passenger boat a few hours down the Alberni Inlet to the little town of Bamfield on the Pacific coast. It can only be reached by boat or by driving two hours on logging roads through the mountains. Bamfield east and west are separated by an inlet of water about as wide as the channel between Chappy and Edgartown. There are other similarities to us in this little town with a year-round population of about 300. Half the people live on the east side of the water, where the town services and institutions (such as they are) are located, including a busy marine science study center. On the west side, which can only be reached by boat, the houses and people are a bit more offbeat. Only about 50 people live here year-round. There is a boardwalk along the water’s edge with some funky houses and a few artists’ studios, one store, and a cat village with about five cat-size houses inhabited by cats that are fed as a result of donations made at the general store down the boardwalk. Not surprisingly, the east and west sides don’t have much to do with each other. The ferry captain told us he’d asked one east side native how long since she’d been to the west side. She said she didn’t have any friends over there, and it had probably been 16 years since she’d been there. That made me wonder, if I didn’t have to go through Edgartown to get anywhere else, how long before I’d make a trip there.
And thanks to Brad Woodger for entertaining us while I was away.
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