Wait, Spring: A Memoir by Cynthia Riggs, Cleaveland House Books, illustrated, 268 pages, $25.

Great-grand-daughter of a Vineyard whaling captain, daughter of a West Tisbury poet and a New Jersey educator renowned for his Island linoleum block prints, longtime West Tisbury bed and breakfast proprietor, mystery book writer and writing teacher, Cynthia Riggs has now written not only of her Vineyard years but of much more.

In her new memoir, Ms. Riggs writes about her love and marriage in her 80s with a nonagenarian, and her exceptional traveling life.

She has paddled the Hudson River by canoe from New Jersey to Albany with her first husband, George Stoertz, and, while four months pregnant circumnavigated Manhattan with him by canoe. Since he was a geologist, Ms. Riggs camped out in the Nevada desert with him and five young children while he was on geological expeditions.

Later, with a  tent-trailer for overnights, they explored much of the South, Midwest and West. They visited the Black Rock Desert of Nevada, Las Vegas and test rocket sites. When their children were older, Ms. Riggs took a job with the Smithsonian’ Oceanographic Sorting Center. It included sailing around Antarctica for two months on a research vessel. Delighted with that scientific journey, she later returned to Antarctica as a journalist. In time, she would become the editor of the National Petroleum Institute’s  publication Petroleum Today.

Ms. Riggs has gone by 32-foot sailboat back and forth to the Azores. She has not only edited science magazines and petroleum magazines, but written for the National Geographic.

She has been an Olympic fencer. She has lived alone on a44-foot houseboat. She has been a cruise boat captain and director of the Nathan Mayhew Seminars, a summer school that briefly prospered on the Island.

She has also been the Oak Bluffs harbor master.

Then, with her varied and exciting background, it was suggested by a friend that she take a course in writing at Vermont College. She did, and the books she has written since, starring her mother, the West Tisbury poet Dionis Coffin Riggs, as a nonagenarian sleuth have become national.

But the highlight of her life has been her near-magical reconnecting and marriage (in her 80s) with a beau from her teenage years as a student at Antioch College in Ohio. It was a marriage that also made her a star of The Moth national radio show.

The book is a particularly galloping romp for Vineyarders because of its warm recollections of her childhood West Tisbury summers. It is also adorned with family photos and with photos by her longtime friend, Lynn Christoffers of West Tisbury.

It is a memoir not to be missed.