From the June 30, 1971 edition of the Vineyard Gazette:

The solstice is well past, and summer, hardly begun, will be sliding ever so gently down hill. This is the lazy mood of summer, well established by a lazy-sounding word.

One’s experience of early mornings will be changing now in a slowly-altered course or direction, and so on through the day. The morning retain, though, their own quality of springtime, transitional between cool nights and warm days. In their gentle neutrality it is rewarding once again to see the affairs of a late June or early July day beginning.

The early dog-walkers are out, dog only slightly more eager than their owners in whom awareness of a brand new Island morning has something about it of the miraculous.

Cardinals sing tunefully and catbirds untunefully, and trucks go about with batteries of power mowers, dropping on off every here and there. Who remembers when lawns were mowed by the power and authority of muscle?

Milkmen don’t really exist any more. This is the day of milk-dispensing trucks, and not so many as they used to be since it is so easy to pick up mil at the chain store. By 7 o’clock the carpenters are at work, some of them shingling on rooftops, looking across town or across a harbor toward the morning sky.

Here and there a vacationer on a bicycle wheels into the final stretch after an exploration of outlying scenes. Soon the storekeepers and their clerks begin to assemble, some waiting in contemplation or conversation for the clock to strike.

And the summer day, its routines established, is ready for the remembered activity of so many other summer days on the Vineyard.

Those pedestrians on Main street in Edgartown Tuesday morning who knew nothing about parakeets, thought they had found a new addition to the bird list of Martha’s Vineyard when they sighted a brilliant yellow and green bird with blue spots placidly sitting on the roof of a station wagon.

What was more, the bird flew up the street and landed on the hat of Patrolman George L. Searle, who was busy directing traffic. Mr. Searle said that next, the bird flew away to the law offices of Hill and Barlow. There, bird enthusiast Mrs. Russel E. Swartz, a secretary in the office, spotted the bird outside and right away knew the parakeet. With a clam net from the Turf & Tackle, she captured the parakeet, assisted by Mr. Searle and Bruce Page, also armed with nets. The parakeet was then lodged in a small overturned cardboard box in the window sill of the law office, with an ashtray filled with water to his left and parakeet food on his right, and cheeped for his owners to come and claim him.

To everyone who lives near Chilmark Pond, Stanley the snapping turtle is a living legend. As far as anyone can remember, and that’s about 45 years, Stanley, or some relative of his, has been keeping guard over the pond and making sure no one dares swim in his territory.

But recently, Chris Hart, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. D. R. Hart Jr., went out on the pond fishing for perch. And, lo and behold, she discovered that Stanley had a particular fondness for her bait of bacon, and took hold of her line! “He was ferocious,” Miss Hart said. “I was scared to death. He was snapping his mouth and thrashed in the water. His mouth was about an inch across, and he was about a foot and a half long. I thought he was going to break my fiberglass fishing rod.” But before Stanley had a chance to do that, Miss Hart kept alive the legend by cutting Stanley loose. She said she saw him contentedly sunning in the water the next day.

Someone said, and probably it was Thoreau, that the shooting stars in the summer sky are the fireflies of the heavens. It must be the case equally that fireflies are the shooting stars of the dooryard or of the night spaces lying out yonder, wherever yonder may happen to be. Either point of view is appropriate, for in either case the real theme is of mystery.

As good the length of a rose trellis or a path across the lawn as a hundred light years in a matter such as this. The observer is human and impressed with human unimportance; the stars and the fireflies are nature, myth, speculation, memories of more than one year or one lifetime.

As June ends and July begins, the fireflies again signal whatever their message may be; “attraction between the sexes is believed to be a function of the light,” says the encyclopedia. Well, this is plain talk, altogether understandable. As plain but less understandable is the explanation that a substance called luciferin on the abdomen of the firefly is oxidized in the presence of an enzyme called luciferase. Anyway, good enough.

We leave science behind and speculate for ourselves that the shooting stars are incandescent messages of the cosmos, and fireflies are specters acting out old fantasies in the summer night. Both invite the human beholder to consider that his role is often that of onlooker and, as to importance, nothing more.

Compiled by Hilary Wall
library@mvgazette.com