Today marks the last weekend in August, and families and friends are on the Vineyard celebrating. One last trip to Larsen's Fish Market, another round of golf at Farm Neck, a box of Murdick's fudge to go, and a last swim at South Beach. Yet even as we celebrate, we find our conversations slipping into past tense, the summer simultaneously culminating and escaping us, streaming away into memory.

But there is a deeper sense in which the wonders of an Island summer do not escape us, but accrue and are burnished by time. And this is why the continuities of Island life matter so profoundly.

"Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in," wrote Thoreau. "I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains." Island summer, in its very evanescence, is a glimpse of eternity.