I liked turning 90 a year and a half ago. I was given a party overlooking Chilmak Pond by friend Mary Jane Pease. I was presented with a crown with the figure 90 on it, and we all enjoyed a Black Dog birthday cake decorated with the Vineyard Gazette masthead written in frosting. I still have the frosting preserved in my freezer in case I forget that I am the oldest member of the Gazette staff — I have been one on and off for 70 years.

In 1952, I was rescued from a series of less exciting summer jobs by the editors and publishers of the Gazette at the time, Henry Beetle Hough and Elizabeth Bowie Hough. They hired me to be a summer reporter. Before that, I had been a chambermaid one summer, making beds and cleaning toilets at East Chop’s Ahoma Inn.

Another summer I had served ice cream and candy and day-old cakes whose aging frosting had been replaced with fresh frosting. That was at Luce’s Ice Cream and Candy Parlor on the Vineyard Haven waterfront.

I had also been a short order cook at the coffee shop at the Mansion House in Vineyard Haven. There, a wise waitress told me her secret of getting tips. She said I must learn to tell if coffee drinkers who came in were mug men or cup men. Mug men wanted a he-man mug that emphasized their manliness. Cup men wanted a cup, suggesting that they were gentlemen.

Now that fall is almost gone, “like the leaves that before the wild hurricane fly,” I seem to be wobbling. Nonetheless last Sunday I set off, as usual, to walk the Middle Road from Music street.

Sundays, there are fewer speeders than on weekdays. In spring, there are lilies of the valley to admire at the first house I pass. In summer, there are daisies and later goldenrod to gather for bouquets. My destination is always Mermaid Farm, and a chance to wave to the chickens and sheep. Then I nod to the oxen across the road.

At the Dripps house at the start of my walk, the rhododendrons are in bloom in June. Time was, when my favorite summer blueberrying was nearby too. There were both low and high bush blueberries. The bushes are still growing, but no longer bear fruit.

Just at the Chilmark line, a tall holly rises. It always delights me because although a highway crew cut it down long ago, saying it was too close to the road, it boldly grew back and prospered.

But last Sunday, I stopped before I got to Chilmark. Even with a walking stick, I was taking too long (and happily, there was little trash to pick up, as I usually do).

I’ll try again this Sunday to walk my full appointed route. Now that I have adjusted to Daylight Saving Time, it may be easier, I tell myself.

But it was easier at 90 than at 91, and thanks to the Black Dog frosting, I am enjoying reminiscing about my Gazette rescue decades ago.