Spring has arrived this year like a virtual slide show of sound, light and color, overtaking a landscape that the harsh winter had left in tatters with broken trees, roads and fields heaved by frost and a shoreline strewn with rubble.

That’s all over now. In April a flash mob of pinkletinks sang the arrival of a new season from cold, muddy swamps, and soon the Island was covered in yellow daffodils, pink mayflowers and pale green fiddleheads. Island gardeners who keep records have noted the late spring, in some places a full three weeks behind last year depending on the micro-climate.

Suddenly, though, it seems as if everything is catching up and all in a rush. Last week apple trees burst into bloom and wild dogwood that grows along rural roads up-Island was painterly in the late day light. Cherry blossoms float in the wind and litter the streets of Edgartown and Vineyard Haven. Weather conditions have been tinder dry, but mid-week a little rain finally arrived, washing away layers of dust and pollen and casting hayfields and lawns in a deeper shade of emerald. Along Beach Road between Edgartown and Oak Bluffs beach plums are a mass of creamy white blossoms. Soon the bluefish will be running in Nantucket Sound and fishermen will line the jetties, casting into the swift-moving currents. Cue the lilacs, the ubiquitous signature flowers of May, now at their peak just in time for Memorial Day weekend.

The Vineyard is getting ready for another summer season, and there is something reassuring about it all, like the return of an old friend after a long absence. Wasn’t it just yesterday that we saw each other? Hard-working Islanders depend on the summer for financial reasons, because this is the time when most who live here work long hours, often at more than one job, but also for subtler reasons of the spirit. Things are on the upswing now and the salt air is full of sunlight and possibility.

Summer residents returning to their homes this weekend will find an Island at once changed and the same. Town meetings are over and the gate has swung shut on another political season. At the regional high school seniors, soon to be graduates, are full of anticipation for their big day. At Katama Bay, the breach has closed. Twenty-odd miles away on the extreme western end of the Island, the long-awaited Gay Head Light relocation has begun. The old brick lighthouse has been lifted up and gently placed onto skids and is nearly for her historic move to a new foundation some hundred and twenty-nine feet away. There are new places for family entertainment: a shiny new bowling alley opened in Oak Bluffs this week and in Vineyard Haven the Capawock theatre is nearly ready for its grand re-opening. The Strand in Oak Bluffs will follow in June.

In town centers tall ladders hung with paint cans lean against buildings, a testament to the season of sprucing up. Summer workers are arriving, many of them college students from foreign countries on student visa programs. Ferry service has gone into double time, with the Oak Buffs Steamship Authority terminal open and summer passenger ferries ready to launch service this weekend. Taxi drivers are anxious over the arrival of Uber, the online-based ride-sharing service that is upending the transportation-for-hire industry around the world. School children are counting the days to summer break, but that won’t come until the very end of June thanks to the pile of snow days this winter.

Memorial Day is Monday, the national holiday that is a time to remember those who have died in foreign wars.

The Island has its own unique traditions that begin on Friday, when school children in the down-Island towns march to the harbor to throw flowers in the water to commemorate those who were lost at sea. On Monday a parade will begin at 10 a.m. in Vineyard Haven at the American Legion Hall, and end at the Oak Grove Cemetery where the traditional avenue of flags will be set up with hundreds of American flags. Following that, beginning at noon the Tisbury town picnic, an all-inclusive party for the whole Island, will be held on the grassy banks of Lake Tashmoo.

A final reminder to Islanders that as the pace quickens, please slow down: for the next several months we will be sharing the roads with much more than snowplows.

Now let summer begin.