Violet and her friend Cesca went out to western Massachusetts last week for their fist camping trip without family. The first and only night in the tent saw four inches of rain and lightning. Much of the night was spent in the truck cab. They made it home just in time, before the ferry cancellations.

The tropical storm of Friday was not as bad as predicted. Thank goodness. I am a prepper of sorts so I spent some time filling jugs and buckets with water. I can accept power outages except the lack of running water. You folks who get water from the town don’t have the worry of us well people.

Last Thursday before it began raining, I pulled up the rest of my garlic. It had browned and formed its paper. It’s spread out on newspaper all over several surfaces in my house. Happily, this harvest was from cloves I had planted in November from the previous summer.

After the storm, the vegetables and flowers jumped out of the ground. Beans germinated in two days.

I have noticed a good amount of mushrooms growing in unlikely places, i.e. my picnic table. Any day now we might have a hatch of mosquitoes. I haven’t had one bite me in several years. I think my skin may be too old and tough for them.

There is an impressive mimosa at the mailboxes of Snake Hollow in Vineyard Haven. It’s really a stand out, after the Tashmoo overlook on the left, going up-Island.

I broke one of the Ten Commandments on my way to church on Sunday. I coveted the row of hostas at the house next to the Edgartown Federated Church. They had enormous blue-green leaves and chest-high flowers. I would have something similar except deer ate every single one of the flowers right before they opened. Lucky people who live right in town. Deer seem to avoid downtown areas so far.

I got bees this year. I haven’t had them in several years. Recently, when putting on a second hive body, I discovered a huge colony of ants between the two covers. They had not yet made it into the actual hive. I was wearing my bee suit and thought I was protected. The ants got inside and bit me. It was a whole new meaning of the expression “ants in my pants.”

Climate change has been a big news story this summer, what with the extreme heat in the northwest and up into the Arctic Circle, of all places.

I’ve been thinking about how much it has affected my little corner of the world. Lilacs are blooming a full month earlier; winters are very mild; and I’m getting more tick bites this year than ever before. Remember when the Vineyard Haven harbor froze in the winter and Coast Guard cutters had to break a path for the morning ferries?

Where am I going with this? Oh, yeah, I’m completely irritated with the ego battle between Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson. Branson’s three-minute experience in space cost a quarter of a million dollars and rained jet fuel on the rest of us who are struggling to pay our bills.

Two better human beings, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, celebrated 75 years of marriage last week. In a PBS interview, Jimmy was asked to describe his term in office. He paraphrased his vice president, Walter Mondale, saying “We kept the peace. We obeyed the law. We told the truth. We respected human rights.”

Amen!