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She first expressed interest at age three in becoming a baggage handler. He said with determination at age four that he would become a cloud wrangler, no question about it. She liked ants and at age five wondered if they needed a kindly aunt. At age six he wished to become king of Wednesdays, his favorite day of the week. At age seven she watched a star fall, its arc tracing the sky, and thought yes, that’s it, I want to be a falling star, echoing through the ages and watched closely by night owls, astronomers and curious little girls.

On this New Year’s Day may you resolve to remember all your dreams — the small and the tall, the near and the dear, and, especially, the very weird.

On Saturday in the Bunch of Grapes bookstore a woman runs into Carly Simon. There is no event or reading, just a chance encounter while browsing through the stacks.

The woman is beside herself, seeing her hero in person she says. She quickly scurries to another part of the store, gathers up her daughter and granddaughter and brings them to meet Ms. Simon, who graciously accepts this wave of good will. The women say they are lifelong fans, to have been helped through hard times by the music and that this meeting means so much to them. The younger woman holds her daughter in her arms, a small girl of about two.

Ms. Simon smiles at the girl as she bends down to go eye to eye with her. Then she begins to sing a lullaby, and it is as if the whole store has gone quiet as the moment builds and circulates. No one else approaches, but a few watch from nearby.

When the song is over and Ms. Simon exits the store, the women are nearly breathless with excitement.

“My 2016 dreams already just came true,” one says.

“The rest is gravy,” the other agrees.

The young girl says nothing, though. She has fallen deeply asleep.

She says thank heavens for the cold weather, I missed seeing the breath flow from my mouth like smoke from a dragon. He says if you were a dragon I wouldn’t be shivering.

She says in the dark of early morning, while walking past a house with one light shimmering in the window, she gets all the heat she needs. He says lying in bed beneath three comforters is very comforting. She says what about winter nights, when the stars look close enough to hold, isn’t that hot? He says it’s not, but an extra log on the fire hits the spot.

She says what about spring, when the pinkletinks sing their songs of unrequited love and the snow gives way to snowdrops, will you be warm then? He says yes, most definitely, like a sleepy snapping turtle sunning itself on a rock.

Okay then, she says, we’ll meet again come spring when you have more bite. He says it’s a date, and then retreats back into the comfort of his own hard shell.

On a quiet Vineyard morning in January six people populate a diner — three patrons and three employees. Those doing the work are all family — mother, son and daughter — and their conversations range from the griddle to home and back again. Those on the other side of the counter feel like family, as frappes are shared by all on both sides.

One patron in particular is a regular, nearly a daily one, he says. A crossword enthusiast and good at it too, he is at work on the Globe as he also works on his eggs. But he doesn’t fill in the blanks. The employees like to do the crossword too, they say, and so instead of filling in the blanks, he spends his time writing extra clues for the hardest words.

After breakfast, the man pays his check, leaving both a tip and a clean crossword with extra clues for the workers to while away a gray winter day.

For the other patrons, the rest of day is filled with this and that, but nothing can shake the memory of a man pondering clues to clues, day after day, while eating eggs over easy, crispy bacon and a side of fries.

In the deep dark of night a man can’t sleep. He wanders the house, shuffling about, then settles down with a book. But the plot involves a lonely man with no direction and lots of insomnia. That won’t do.

In the morning, when everyone awakes and the man is bleary-eyed and feeling like yesterday’s wash he takes his daughter to school. There is a morning meeting and when a woman stands up to lead the school in song he is tempted to run back out the door. But he stays, and he is glad he did.

The song is We Shall Overcome, in honor of Martin Luther King. The woman leading has everyone stand and hold hands, but not in the usual way. Instead, hands are held like Dr. King and the marchers did, arms crossed across the body like a hug. To hold another’s hand one must stand shoulder touching shoulder — and so it goes all through the open hallway of the school, parent to parent, child to child, parent to child, all standing shoulder to shoulder while this hymn of hope is raised to the rafters.

When the song ends and the man returns outside it is snowing. He leans his head back, sticks his tongue out and gulps the flakes down like a child. And when he looks around he sees that he is not alone.

The other day was windy. How windy?

A woman pulled up to a bank drive-through window. She was on her way to work and needed a large amount of small bills for the day’s transactions. She filled out a withdrawal slip for $300, asking for ones, fives and tens.

The tube disappeared back into the bank and soon returned to the car. But when the woman opened the small door to the canister, a greedy gust of wind sailed in. The money flew everywhere, dancing high in the air like a flock of green starlings.

The woman jumped out of the car, and the drive-through teller ran out to help her. The two of them chased the money down looking as if they were on a game show, a reprisal of Blizzard of Bucks performed outside now.

All but a few dollars were found; evidently the wind charges interest. But the excitement of an early morning money chase turned out to be better than a triple espresso to get the day started.

Someone in the newsroom noticed that Jan. 21 was squirrel appreciation day. The Notebook doesn’t put much stock in this sort of thing (at least not until there is a Notebook appreciation day). Who exactly decides this anyway?

And yet consider this. Recently, a family was driving around the Island — parents up front, kids in the back. Sad to report that the kids were arguing, the father yelling and the whole event quite unpleasant for everyone. But then time seemed to stop for a moment, or at least slow down to a whisper. Not far down the road a squirrel darted out. It moved fast and a car traveling in the opposite direction was sure to hit it. The family of arguers watched helplessly as the squirrel continued to run toward what looked like certain death.

Then an odd thing happened. The squirrel ran head on into one of the tires, bounced back up in the air, head over tail, and then landed safely, feet first on the road. It stood for a moment stunned, then shook its furry face and ran back into the woods.

The family cheered for the super squirrel, and for the rest of the day not an argument was heard. Perhaps squirrel appreciation day is not such a bad idea after all.

While out shoveling, a man pauses to rest. He leans heavily on his shovel, breathes deeply and looks to the woods. There he sees a rhododendron, its buds small and closed and dusted with snow. And with that he is off, thousands of miles away and decades earlier to when he wore a younger man’s muscles.

The rhododendron he saw so long ago was impossibly tall and blooming a deep red. It was part of a full forest by the side of a mountain trail which he had been walking on for nearly a month. He walked slowly, the altitude high and the air thin, and he stopped for a long time to stare at the blooms. This was back when nothing made sense and yet everything was always in full bloom.

Now, as he leans on the shovel, watching his breath smoke through the air, he wonders what, if anything, caused him to remember this seemingly mundane moment. The world is white, tree branches dip to the ground under the weight of the snow and dusk settles in all around him. Inside the house his family sits by the fire waiting for him, and all at once he is stunned by how remarkable this is.

Burger nights are everywhere as are men in beards. Five Corners is a breeze, but dark at 5 p.m. still hurts. Adult coloring books are all the rage this winter, and early bedtimes standard form.

Walks before dawn are calming and cold. Stargazing is the same but with an added touch of vertigo from pondering the infinite.

And a stranger was sighted at Cronig’s, which was the talk of the town on Thursday — not many unfamiliar faces on the Island in deep winter. But then it turned out to be Stephen Gostkowski and everyone turned away. At least it looked like him, over in the vegetable aisle, muttering to himself and place-kicking some avocados perfectly onto the scale. But bundled up who knows who is who anyway.

February looms. It’s hard to see what’s real and what’s not. But that’s okay because we like it that way.

It’s Groundhog Day, but if feels rather odd to be wondering whether winter will stick around for another six weeks since winter has been decidedly absent this year. A few cold days, one snowstorm, that’s it.

More interesting perhaps is why the groundhog comes out of his hole at all.

According to National Geographic it’s for love. The male pops out first, the females a week later. But it’s just a reconnaissance mission. They assess where the opposite sex is burrowed, then go back to hibernate for a month or so and meet up for real in March.

Sort of a slow moving group, the groundhogs. The rabbits, also known as the Saturday Night Fever of the rodent world, mock them mercilessly.

Have you ever thought about how hard it might be to drive a school bus, especially in the afternoon when the kids are extra antsy after a full day spent inside at school? Well, one bus driver has a unique method of keeping the students in line.

After a particularly unruly child would not quiet down, the driver called him to the front of the bus. “Always remember,” the driver began, “that my finger can go deeply into your ear, and I know where you live.”

Almost immediately the atmosphere aboard the bus settled down to barely a whisper. But then, heard from an open window as the bus drove by, came the unmistakable cackling of an adult who had finally earned the last laugh.

It is still dark, the house sleeping and it takes tiptoes to slip down the stairs and put on a coat, hat and boots. He steps out alone into the snow and wind, but before he has gone far the memory of his grandfather joins him, the one who taught him about the beauty of rising before the sun.

It was always summer when he sat in the kitchen as a boy with his grandfather, checking lures and reels before heading to the ocean together.

He is a man now, a father too, and his grandfather long dead. But in the cold and the deep snow they walk together again, whispering in the dark as they once did about matters weighty and small.

They continue on for a bit, and then the quiet is broken as a voice calls from the house, “Hey dad, wait for me.”

Two men stand on a street corner talking. They are old friends, from before they had children when they talked of nothing and everything. Now when they meet they talk of the children, with smiles and grins, and sometimes a tired sigh like parents do everywhere.

But recently one of the men has been walking the hardest road imaginable for a parent. But the news is very good lately, and the family recently returned from a Make a Wish vacation, where the daughter swam with dolphins for days. “These days I ask myself what would Jimmy Buffet do,” the man says with regard to how he makes decisions. “And he would always choose to have fun.”

As they part ways the other man stops, breathes heavily and looks up at the sky. His friend is the bravest man he has ever known, he is sure of it.

There’s a certain poetry to living in an old farmhouse. For starters, there is the light. They knew how to site houses all those years ago, facing south, with windows too on the east and west, back turned mostly to the cold northerly winds of winter. In the morning, from the kitchen as you make tea you can watch the day break just below the treeline. By lunchtime the front hallway is flooded with sunlight. The dog dozes in it. In mid-afternoon golden light slants across the living room. At day’s end, back in the kitchen again, the western sky is streaked with pink as the sun sinks on another winter day on the Vineyard. This one is so bitterly cold it has taken from dawn to dusk to make the house warm (crank the heat, build a fire, bake bread). But the days are longer now and the cold won’t last, not even this sub-zero snap that freezes the breath on exhale. What endures is the farmhouse, and its poetry.

The newsroom can be an oddly quiet place. A full room of people, reporters and editors at their desks, but all involved in the business of writing, which is mostly a solitary affair.

But then amid the tapping of the computer keys some subject will be tossed into the room and a sort of chaos will reign for bit. This week it was the trauma of books read as a child where the main character, an animal, dies.

As soon as the teacher started reading a book with an animal in it, I put my head down on my desk and plugged my ears.

My third grade teacher made us read Island of the Blue Dolphins. A dog died, but worse was when the brother gets eaten by wild dogs. I went back to school and yelled at the teacher for making us read it.

I named my pet guinea pigs after the two dogs, Old Dan and Little Ann, who died in Where the Red Fern Grows.

The Incredible Journey, now there was a story about animals with a happy ending and no death.

And then as quickly as the conversation had erupted it died down. But it seemed the tapping was now being done in a different key — somewhat quieter, nostalgic and perhaps a bit sad. But will it have any effect on the week’s stories themselves? One never knows.

This is Quiet Island week on the Vineyard, otherwise known as school vacation week. Wait a minute, you may say, wasn’t that last week? Not for the Island. Years ago, Vineyard schools took their winter vacation during the Presidents’ Day week, like most other public schools in New England. Then at some point the vacation week was changed. The reason was to make travel easier for the many Island families who were escaping north (for skiing), south (for sun) or slightly north (to Cape Cod for fast food).

February vacation is just one more way the Island is different. What’s the same is that every year during this week, the Island is so quiet you can hear yourself think. Best done outdoors where others won’t misinterpret your look of amazement.

Move over all you snowdrops and crocuses, a true harbinger of spring has landed — the truest one of all.

Laurie Clements called the Gazette office Thursday afternoon to report that she had just heard pinkletinks. Ms. Clements was calling from the Chappaquonsett area in Vineyard Haven, near Chipchop. Cell service was patchy so we couldn’t hear them peep. But we could hear Ms. Clements.

“Pinkletinks,” she exclaimed. “There were three or four of them.” Huzzah for spring.

Thousands of miles away, on school break, a little girl goes kayaking with her family. Deep within the mangrove tunnels she chats up a fellow kayaker. The girl is the type to view everyone as a potential friend, especially men with big, bushy beards.

While chatting, their worlds begin to overlap until it is discovered he is the son of her second grade teacher, grown up now and no longer living on the Island. Shaking their heads in disbelief, they swap tales, the son and the young student, of mom the teacher. She receives excellent marks from both.

The son send a text to mom. While a manatee bobs nearby and a pelican looks for lunch, the message is returned:

“Make sure she eats her broccoli on vacation. We begin studying cursive next week.”

A man sits down at one of the weekly community suppers on the Island and looks around. The room is completely full, a cross section of Islanders, from the truly hungry to those looking for company on cold, dark evenings, to parents with small children enjoying a night off from kitchen duties.

The man also sees, sitting in the far corner, a landscaper who watched over his grandmother many years ago. The landscaper always saluted the old woman whenever he left for the day. At the door he would turn, raise his fist in the air and say to her: “Courage, life takes courage.”

The landscaper smiles and raises his fist from across the room.

On the other side of the room is a writer the man had admired for years from afar, but is now a friend. The writer is now blind and when the call for dessert rings out the man holds out his arm and escorts the writer to the buffet. In line they talk of sentences, the long and the short of them, and essays written long ago and one that is just now percolating.

Back at his table, while eating dessert with his son, the man is overcome with the enormity of the moment and decorates his bowl with tears.

Sometimes it takes the smallest thing to set the heart right on a hard weekend. In front of Cronig’s, a couple holds hands while walking the few yards from their car into the store. They swing their arms together and walk with a lightness of step as if they might sail off at any moment like kites.

Neither are young and the mind both wonders and wanders. The simple act of holding hands seems to live more frequently in the domain of teenagers, or parents and children crossing the road. But really, it should never go out of style. After all it goes with everything — scarves, boots, T-shirts or dresses, rain, sun and especially a partial eclipse.

On a weekend that saw so many Islanders dressed not in casual weekend wear but rather suit jackets and ties on their way to not one, but two or three funerals, the sight of a couple holding hands while shopping still lingers, thankfully.

Although the newsroom is aware of most things, there is one surprise that awaits all but one each week — the skyline. It is bad luck for any but the one who chooses to know in advance what fragment of poetry will grace the top of page one.

Then at end of day on Thursday, sometimes deep into the night, the editors gather round toread the headlines one last time, and to check page numbers, widows and orphans, and the spelling of names.

And finally, when all is tucked in tight for the night, the skyline is revealed and readaloud — sometimes cheery, sometimes not, but always reminiscent of the world, both now and then.

Many among us have private lives away from work, those activities known to family and friends but not really to those you rub elbows with on the nine to five. But then something happens and this other world becomes known. On Monday, not only did the staff of the Gazette learn the extent of Mark Lovewell’s camaraderie with the waterfront, Mr. Lovewell himself was surprised. This past weekend he thought he was just attending the 54th annual meeting of the international catboat association in Groton, Conn. Little did he know he was to be the main event.

At the gathering, Mr. Lovewell was honored with the 2016 John Killam Murphy award, given annually to one who “preserves the tradition of sail in catboats.” The last Vineyarder to win this award was Oscar C. Pease in 1969.

Come summer, Mr. Lovewell will be piloting catboats around the Island, both his own called the Sea Chantey and as steward of the Edwina B. now owned by the Preservation Trust — and perhaps bellowing a sea chantey into the wind as well. Give him a wave and a hearty well done. And then ask him to take you sailing.

A parent drives down a quiet road. The wind picks up and the bare trees sway as if scratching an itch in the gray sky. It is a melancholy moment as she ponders a pending birthday. Not her own; her young child’s.

When did these happy moments turn from celebrations into something more emotional, she wonders? When did birthdays begin echoing forward to that time when this small creature will leave the house to start her own life? When did going through clothes outgrown, folding them into bags to give to some other mother, become long journeys back in time, all the way to the delivery room?

As she drives she can almost feel the kick in her belly again. But then the moment is gone as she pulls up to a store. She has presents to buy and a party to plan — it is a sloth theme. There will even be a game as the kids compete to move the slowest, just like sloths.

She smiles thinking how she will move slowly then too, trying to stop time, if just for a moment.

The gloves had been put away, the ice scraper too, and so it was a bare hand that cleaned the windshield of snow. This seemed fitting for a morning when snowdrops settled down on snowdrops, and pinkletinks found their calls of love muffled under a few inches of spring snow.

It was most likely the last gasp of a winter that wasn’t, March pounding its chest and roaring because why not, before April moves in to take over the show.

The in-between time has arrived and no baby snowstorm can stop it. Sometimes it is a muddy meditation, other times a salute to the sun — either way, Spring is here.

The Notebook is arriving late this week because of technical issues with the Gazette website. These have been resolved, and we are now able to send you the headline stories and featured commentary for your weekend reading.

The Notebook itself will return to its regular schedule starting on Tuesday. Thank you for your understanding.

Sometimes all it takes is a woman playing the piano seated alone in a quiet room, with the lights off and dusk falling outside. Down the street a porch lamp glows soft like a tiny sunset, and in a room nearby there is the hustle of activity. But in this room it is dark and growing darker, the notes building and settling, as the woman searches for the keys.

The piano player does not see the young girl tiptoe in and sit quietly with her back to the wall, or her father looking for her and then joining her against the wall. They hold hands in the dark and the music holds them in place, and if you close your eyes you can be there too, in the dark held by the notes of a woman playing by feel as if her life depended on it, which it surely does.

As the lamb of March rears its head on the last day of the month to push the roar of the lion back down its throat, a man drives with the windows down, the music loud and his heart beating like a teenager again. The warm winds of spring deliver a new energy; just ask the tom turkeys courting their ladies in the middle of the road.

April 1, the Fool’s Day, also brings out the beast within. As a teenager, he once switched the sugar with the salt and vice versa. That evening at dinner his father kept putting more and more salt on his steak, not understanding why it only turned the meat sweeter, until his son’s laughter told the tale.

Later that night, when the young man returned home long past curfew and was trying to tiptoe up the backstairs, he tripped over a rope set at shin level and attached to a pile of pots and pans. Amid the clanging and banging, he heard the unmistakable sound of his father’s laughter, roaring loud and clear from upstairs.

May the music run deep, the turkey tango inspire and the foolish continue to flourish this season.

On a rainy Monday, the Notebook poured a large cup of tea and perused the annual reports of Edgartown and West Tisbury, the only two circulated thus far. Sound like a snore? How wrong you are.

Tucked among the finance reports and pages of spreadsheets in West Tisbury, the cemetery commission reported 16 burials and 19 lots sold during the last year. The building inspector issued permits for among other things, one screened porch, 13 sheds and one Pickle Ball court. And over at the animal control office, there were 1074 dog calls, 120 cat calls, and six feral cats run over by cars calls.

The Edgartown report has a similar roundup of the clerical and the magical that takes place each year. But the Notebook had trouble going past page seven where old friend Bob Carroll was smiling wide once again, leading his town one last time in memoriam. He died on March 31, 2015. Town meetings are coming; are you ready?

He stands at the front of the class, beginning a talk on writing. In front of him are teenagers, in a state of early morning high school dishevelment, many looking wistfully out the window. He talks about his favorites, those who came before and opened wide what a sentence could really be. He reads examples — a weird one, a quiet one and a manic one, all voices that changed his life.

He has them write, with pencil and paper, trying to mimic these masters. Then he asks them to read their writing, not knowing what, if anything, will result.

One young man sitting silent near the back of the room, chewing on his thumb and trying to look small, begins, slowly at first and then gaining steam. He is playing basketball in a gym named after his dead grandfather. He hears the crowd, he says, but louder still, calling above even his mother and father, is his grandfather cheering for him once again. His grandfather’s voice carries him down the court and lifts him up toward the net as if he were still very much alive, which he is until the final buzzer sounds. Then the boy sits alone in the locker room counting the days until the next game. The classroom is quiet and the man at the front of the room approaches the boy to show him a trail of goose bumps which run up and down his arm.

At the jumping bridge, a group of pigeons huddles together on the sidewalk like young kids nervous about their first jump. Above them, flying just a few inches above the railing and gliding the full length of the bridge, a lone crow shows off, while another watches from above.

In the near distance an island of sand looks alive as gulls wander among the nesting grass and waves break gently in the current.

In the wind a memory appears of a boy sitting on the bow of a red kayak while his grandfather paddles him through the channel. Many years later that same boy paddled that same kayak through the channel spreading his grandfather’s ashes into the waves.

It has become a sacred place, especially on quiet days, when the clouds turn a certain shade of gray, the sand still feels cool to the touch, and the birds look as if they can talk, which they do if you stand very still and whisper that you love them.

This week the Notebook has been pondering who and what it would be without Beverly Cleary. On Tuesday Mrs. Cleary celebrated her 100th birthday, and therefore so did Ramona and Beezus, Henry Huggins, Ribsy, Ralph S. Mouse (his motorcyle too) and the many other characters she created over the years. Close your eyes for a moment and imagine them all gathered around the cake helping her blow out the candles.

Mrs. Cleary is not a Vineyarder in the tangible sense, but her books populate Island libraries and most likely many homes here too. The Notebook still remembers quite clearly how it felt to be eight years old, seated on a Vineyard porch in deep July and reading these words from The Mouse and the Motorcycle: “Neither the mouse nor the boy was the least bit surprised that each could understand the other. Two creatures who shared a love for motorcycles naturally spoke the same language.”

Happy birthday Beverly Cleary and thank you so very much.

A deejay on a Cape Cod radio station the other day recalled an old expression about spring weather on the Cape and Islands: “January, February, March, March, March, March, July.” It’s been especially true this year, where the wind off the cold ocean has made it feel like endless March. On the Vineyard, no one is busting out the shorts and T-shirts yet. But there are towhees scuffling in the hedgerows, lilacs in bud, fat quahaugs and oysters in the ponds waiting to be raked. The senses are awakening. “Mixing memory and desire,” Eliot wrote. Nothing cruel about that.

What better way to be fully in the spirit of today than with the words of Wendell Berry. “One cannot live in the world,” wrote the poet and farmer. “That is, one cannot become, in the easy generalizing sense with which the phrase is commonly used, a world citizen. There is no such thing as a global village. No matter how much one may love the world as a whole, one can live fully in it only by living responsibly in one part of it.”

Happy Earth Day from The Notebook. Please live responsibly, wherever you are.

She is afraid to go to sleep she tells her father. There are nightmares waiting out there, of werewolves, wide open spaces and scary marionettes. To soothe his young daughter, he tells her what once worked for him, as a boy afraid to go to sleep.

He used to imagine an enormous bug where all the kids went to play, climbing up on its back and hidden away from the world of adults and things that were scary. The kids could play anything on top of this genial, giant bug — baseball and badminton, paint pictures, swing on swings, eat candy and cupcakes. It was a free-for-all and everyone was happy. This always worked, he says while looking up at the ceiling and re-imagining this safe place he once conjured up at will.

He turns to his daughter, thinking that now she will be able to invent up her own happy place and soon be sound asleep, but her eyes are wide and her face contorted.

A giant bug? she shrieks. What is wrong with you? Could you please leave and tell mom to come in.

Senior spring, high school or college, it doesn’t really matter. The work has been done, the future awaits and yet the past is there too, a journey walked with fellow students, some known since nursery school.

Petty arguments and cliques seem to disappear in the collective march toward graduation. The weather warms, thewindows rise and each night is one step closer to the last night for this stage of life. Anticipation and nostalgia snuggle up to each other under the moon and stars, forming a unique union that feels both anchored and weightless at the same time.

Enjoy this time students. Enjoy this time parents, too, by watching and remembering how it once felt to peer over theedge of your childhood bed and see standing there by the doorway the first hazy glimpse of your adult self.

At the Federated Church in Edgartown on Sunday, the deacons handed out tissues along with the church bulletin. It was to be the Rev. Amy Edwards last sermon at the church she began serving in September of this year. Her term had been cut short by cancer and she was saying goodbye.

For those expecting the Last Lecture, she said, her words would not resonate on that universal level. She was just going to speak to the congregation as a minister to her flock. Reverend Edwards was aided by her mother, also a minister, who helped lead the service.

Every moment of every day there are quiet moments of strength and character taking place. It is part of the human condition. But sometimes these moments become public ones due to a person’s role in the community. The sight of these two women, a mother and her daughter, wearing their stoles and smiling as they were both lifted up in prayer, said everything about their spirit.

May she travel in peace, knowing that a part of the Island travels with her.

Two hundred years ago, during the summer of 1816, it was quite cold. In New England it snowed in early June, and there were damaging frosts in July and August.Crops failed and if folks went to the beach at all back then they went dressed for winter. The cause was an unusually high amount of volcanic activity which blew dust into the atmosphere, blocking out some of the sun’s warming rays.

But why bring this up now, in May, two hundred years later? To brighten the mood, of course. Sure it rains buckets everyday, hats and gloves have yet to make a retreat to basement closets and even the dog doesn’t want to go outside. But cheer up, the volcanoes around the world seem relatively quiet, and snow is not yet predicted for this summer. Now if only spring would really arrive.

He was having a dark night of the creative soul, the words no longer tumbling out, when there was a knock at the door. There didn’t appear to be anyone there, standing on the porch, but something out in the woods beckoned. It was raining, the stars hiding and the trees looming. It didn’t matter. Something out there was calling.

He walked for a bit, in the dark and the wet, bare feet sloshing, until he came to a small clearing. Nothing out of the ordinary, not yet. He began gathering some sticks, some moss, some leaves and after about an hour he had created a crowd of people out there in the woods, made up of the earth.

They all looked at him and said the same thing: we are waiting.

In Edgartown, a man holds tightly to a ladder, perched high in the sky and leaning against the steeple of the Federated Church. He has spent the past few weeks painting the steeple. When he is on break, it is just the ladder up there, pointing to the sky. During one of these breaks, a woman walking by stops for a moment and stares. As she continues on her way, she begins singing the opening bars to Stairway to Heaven.

Up-Island, a young student of kindergarten age stands up at an all-school morning meeting. “Did you know there are meteors with imprints of dragons on them,” he states quite firmly. “These are called dragon meteors.” When he sits down, the entire school claps and the boy's smile is as huge as a dragon meteor.

Tomorrow, May 14, is the 170th birthday of the Vineyard Gazette.

What do these three things have in common? Nothing. And everything.

On Sunday morning there appeared to be a swan party at the westernmost edge of Chilmark Pond near Lucy Vincent Beach, also known as Upper Upper Chilmark Pond. Nearly 30 swans dotted the pond, in couples, singles and large groups.

It was both a startling and raveshing sight, so many swans in one place, and a few onlookers fondly remembered reading E.B. White’s Trumpeter of the Swan as children. But then a newcomer to the scene shuddered and recounted the story of her father being beaten up by a swan, returning home from a golfing outing with a broken arm. Evidently, a large swan had taken a liking to the man’s pitching wedge which he had left at pond’s edge while he finished putting. When the man tried to retrieve his club, the angry swan bashed him near senseless with his wings.

A cool wind blew off the ocean, clouds wandered lazily across the blue sky, and all was quiet for a moment as visions of swans in great numbers turned from beautiful to rather frightening.

Harbors are good places to go fishing for memories. The alchemy of boat exhaust, cut bait and salt spray tends to move the mind backwards instead of forwards.

A grandfather long dead appears once again to teach a young boy how to bait a hook with cut squid and wipe the remains across his T-shirt, a badge of honor to bring home to mom. A grandmother surfaces too, in her floppy hat and large sunglasses, the summer she broke her leg and had to sit at the water’s edge, cane in one hand, cocktail in the other.

And then there are two brothers, young and inseparable again, casting too close to each other at the end of the pier. Instead of a fish, the older caught the younger in the head with a Swedish Pimple lure. That was a long time ago, but returning to sixth grade with half a head shaved, a small scar and a story to tell, still feels like yesterday while watching the sun set on an otherwise unremarkable day in late May.

A team of parents or teachers, it’s hard to distinguish from a distance, pulls three wagonloads of small children down a bike path. It is a caravan of kids, the preschool variety from new walkers to steady talkers.

All is calm on this journey until one of the adults yells out: “Toot, toot.”

All eyes turn and from down the road a cement truck appears. The kids cheer, point and swing their legs back and forth in their wagons. The truck driver acknowledges his fan base with a mighty tug on his horn, and the children wave and cheer some more.

But even before the driver has time to savor his moment as a rock star, the children turn away to look back down the road. A fire truck has been sighted, and all thoughts of the coolness of cement trucks vanish.

The truck driver gives another, quieter honk in acknowledgement of this hierarchy of the road, but no one seems to notice. Then he turns left and disappears into a small fog that had been building that day.

When spring begins to turn the corner to summer I feel like a kid again, she said. I am in the ninth grade, looking out the window and fidgeting in my seat. And when the bell rings I run, down the hall, out the door and away from everyone and everything.

I remember, he said.

Yo do?

Yes, I watched you disappear, he said. And now every year at this time I worry you will run away again.

But didn’t you know, she said. I was looking for you.

I guess I was too slow, he said.

On the wall next to a window there is a calendar with a watercolor picture of clothes hanging on a line. The clothes appear to be dancing, a colorful collection of pants, shirts and towels all enjoying a warm afternoon breeze.

Outside, in real time now, two children play badminton using an old clothesline as a net. A sprinkler rotates, cooling off the small children as well as a garden of fledgling vegetables nearby.

The calendar states it is May 2016, but the scene outside is timeless, and while watching it unfold a gift slowly emerges, the memory of James Agee’s essay, Knoxville: Summer of 1915:

But it is of these evenings, I speak. Supper was at six and over by half past. There was still daylight, shining softly and with a tarnish, like the lining of a shell; and the carbon lamps lifted at the corners were on in the light, and the locusts were started, and the fire flies were out, and a few frogs were flopping in the dewy grass, by the time the fathers and the children came out. The children ran out first hell bent and yelling those names by which they were known; then the fathers sank out leisurely in crossed suspenders, their collars removed and their necks looking tall and shy.

Summer jobs, especially on the Vineyard, are a rite of passage for most. He remembers the first one, picking blueberries in his grandparent’s backyard and selling them for 40 cents a pint. Later, as he grew older, there were restaurant jobs and retail, a liquor store gig and a summer at a golf course minding the driving range. Several times a day he drove a souped up golf cart, fully enclosed and with a feeder attached to the back, out onto the range to gather up the balls. On each outing he was pelted with golf balls as the golfers took aim at him in the cart. Today, so many decades later, he can still hear the loud thwack and the laughter from the golfers after a direct hit.

One summer he worked at a graveyard, mowing the lawns and clearing the weeds around the headstones. Occasionally, he took naps in the warm afternoon sun, lying down on the grass next to his favorite headstones, the oldest ones.

The next summer he worked at a nursing home, riding his bicycle each day past the graveyard on his way to work. At the nursing home he swept and mopped the floors, a teenage janitor among the elderly. He made some friends with the residents, one woman in particular who played the piano each morning. As the summer wore one she caught a cold, grew sick and stopped playing the piano. And then one day she was no longer there.

For the rest of the summer he took the long way home so he did not have to pass the graveyard anymore.

A little girl finds a dead moth on the front walkway and begins crying. She is still sniveling while seated in the back seat with her older brother as her father drives down a dirt road. Suddenly a small chipmunk appears in the road, a safe distance away.

“Look,” she calls out with glee. Then a cat is spotted in close pursuit, and tosses the chipmunk in the air. The little girl screams. Her brother screams. Her father stops the car: “Not on my watch,” he yells and leaps to the chipmunk’s aid. His children join him in forming a wall so the cat can’t get to the chipmunk. They all point to the woods and urge the chipmunk to run for it.

But the small creature has a different plan. He runs into the car, the doors of which were left open. The cat follows the chipmunk. The father, son and daughter follow the cat. It is a blur of fur and people, in and out of car doors like some clown car event staged for publicity. But there is no one watching save an ornery crow who comments on the scene with a series of loud caws.

After a few rounds in the car, the chipmunk finally heads to the woods, the family drives off triumphantly and the cat stands in the middle of the road staring intently at the departing vehicle as if memorizing the license plate.

This week, while reading the Oak Bluffs town column by Skip Finley, The Notebook enjoyed being taken back to the days of Dorothy West, the Harlem Renaissance writer, who moved to the Island in 1947. The catalyst for Mr. Finley’s musings was most likely the recent anniversary of her birth on June 2, 1907. But the reason doesn’t really matter; any day is a good day to think about Ms. West, her writings and her perch on her East Chop porch where she held court for so many decades

Consider just this small gem about her mother taken from one of her Oak Bluffs town columns, which she wrote from 1967 to 1993. Ms. West died in 1998 at the age of 91.

Her features were lovely, her eyes wonderfully clear, her perfectly shaped lips cherry red, with laughter always lurking in the corners of her mouth. Mostly, I knew she was beautiful because everybody said so, but I did not really see her beauty until that morning when she came out of her younger sister’s sick room.

Now, on the morning when my mother came out of the sick room, I saw that her face was without color, her eyes tired, her mouth drawn. I remember I said to myself, this is the morning she knows that her sister is going to die. It was then that I beheld my mother’s true beauty for the first time. That tired face was so full of love and compassion that my eyes filled with tears. It is impossible to describe how her ascendant inner beauty, in the moment of revelation, outweighed all that was outward and transitory.

Getting away from it all to live or visit an Island is all well and good, but if you don’t have a boat of your own there’s the issue of getting back to the mainland. Yesterday, the Vineyard greeted its newest ferry, the Woods Hole, with all the pomp and circumstance the new girl deserved — after all, she is a lifeline to “America.”

But what about those early Vineyarders? Well, records state that as far back as 1665 the town of Falmouth licensed an innkeeper to help keep people going back and forth. Then in 1700 a more official ferry between the mainland and Holmes Hole started operating, back in the days when currents, wind and strong backs made the trip possible. In 1830 the first steamship ferry, the Marco Bozzaris, made the trip from New Bedford to the Vineyard.

The new kid on the dock carries with it not just people, cars and freight. It hauls history, perhaps the most valuable cargo on its journey across the Sound. We wish her fair seas, contented tourists and quiet dogs as she makes her own wake in the story of the Vineyard.

Two construction workers play ping-pong on the manicured mansion lawn where they are building a shed this week. Evidently, the owners have not arrived yet but their ping-pong table awaits them.

It is a beautiful scene. Shirts off, tool belts still on, the sound of laughter on a perfect late-spring afternoon.

A third worker stands on the sidelines. He sees a man walking by and asks if he wants to play too, rounding out the foursome. Of course, the man says. They choose up sides by flipping a hammer into the air.

Claw side beats smooth side, two games to one.

Two little girls sit arm and arm playing with mermaids, trying to decide which one they think will be the better swimmer — the one with the tiara or the one with the bright purple fish tail. The girls have not seen each other for a year but their reunion takes up where they left off last summer.

Summer on the Vineyard means many things, but this coming together of Islanders and summer friends — for a day, week or the whole season — feels unique and therefore special, in the way that mermaids and unicorns are special.

Adults feel it too, this seasonal embrace of friends who live afar in the offseason. But the real magic resides with the little ones who first begin relating before they can talk, perhaps crawling together in search of a future outside the confines of their parents' beach blanket.

As the summers add up so does their vocabulary, and in the blink of an eye the urge to roam may involve asking for the car keys, and even traveling together off-Island.

But not yet, please not yet.

On Thursday at the Charter School a second grade teacher personified what it means to be a teacher on the last day of school by sobbing deeply during the final all-school morning meeting of the year. And this wasn’t from joy over her pending summer vacation. She was soon joined by other teachers, parents and students too, as kindergartners gave necklaces to graduating eighth graders, summer birthdays were acknowledged, and then the Vineyard Sound made a surprise appearance to sing three songs, including Doctor My Eyes by Jackson Browne.

One stunned man couldn’t stop crying even later in his car and at odd moments at work. The scene had affected him, but even more was the knowledge that he had almost missed this moment by choosing instead to rush off to work to begin a busy day.

People go just where they will, I never noticed them until, I got this feeling that it’s later than it seems. Doctor, my eyes, tell me what you see.

At the entrance to the Gay Head Beach an older man looked out at the water in a sort of stunned amazement. Wow, he said, to no one in particular. I forgot how beautiful it is up here. The man was from out of town — Edgartown — and he hadn’t been up-Island in close to 30 years, he said.

You want to see something really special, a beachgoer said to him. Head down that way. Beyond the cliffs there’s a nude beach.

Naked people, the older man exclaimed. Isn’t that against the law?

Nah, not here.

Well naked people are against the law in Edgartown, I can tell you that.

A father meets his son one evening in Oak Bluffs. The father was at work all day, the son, almost 12, was out and about on summer vacation. He can wander the Island by public transportation this summer, seemingly fully independent for the first time. The father sees the boy first, sitting on a bench in Post Office Square. He watches his son before approaching, noticing for the first time a few details that reveal who he may be as a man. “Hey,” the son says. “Hey,” the father says.

They sit side by side for a moment, quietly thinking their separate thoughts. The man has no idea what his son is thinking, but he is remembering the day he and his wife first brought their baby home from the hospital. They still didn’t have the hang of the car seat, or anything else about parenting. They looked at each other, both saying out loud: “I have no idea what we do next.” The father puts his arm around his son’s shoulders and sighs with relief when he doesn’t ask him to remove it.

A rabbit nibbles clover in the front yard. A spider wanders down one strand of its web, dangling high in the air from the porch roof. In the trees an industrious robin flies about gathering material for the nest and food for its young family.

Ants march along the rhododendron leaves, traveling great distances measured in inches rather than miles, and a hapless inchworm, blown off course by a slight wind, lands among the ant tribe. But somehow, during this perfect moment, the small green fellow is ignored by the ants and allowed to inch away toward life.

The night before a list had been made of all the fun things to do today. The list was long with people and places and activities. It was the Fourth of July after all. And yet this scene was not on the list. How inexplicable, he thinks, while staring at the inchworm, which at this very moment is still resting comfortably on his forearm.

A man drives two little girls to camp one week. Each morning the girls ask for their favorite pop station. But finally, midweek, the man can’t take it anymore. He quietly replaces the radio station with Nirvana and turns it up very, very loud.

The audio ambush of Smells Like Teen Spirit takes the girls by surprise. Their eyes go wide and their small faces look as if they are registering an ample amount of G-forces.

The man wonders if he has gone too far, if he will hear about it later that night at dinner. He reaches for the volume control, but then the girls start rocking. They shake their heads, snarl a bit and one of them even starts beating her chest like a gorilla. The other girl follows suit, embracing this same ritual while screaming loudly.

The man smiles, knowing that somewhere, somehow, Taylor Swift is shedding a tear, although she has no idea why.

The corn is nearly knee high in the fields already, and in another sort of field a group of men play whiffle ball together. They look to be in their twenties or approaching thirty. They have tattoos, good swings and throwing arms, but already the spring of their youth seems behind them. One calls for a ghost runner after he gets winded running to second base.

Elsewhere, at dockside, the weekend good-byes were in full throttle. Some so-longs are said with relief as guests are waved back from whence they came. For others, though, one man in particular, there are real tears and an ache of sadness not to be assuaged until next year when he returns once again, carrying with him joy, thoughtfulness and a very thin guitar.

On the Katama bike path a small wooden sign leaning against a box of corn flakes announces cool drinks ahead. Soon, a red wagon comes into view with four pitchers of various types of lemonade, a cooler full of ice and cups. The sign says enjoy. That is all. No price tag, no people, just a small can for donations that feels like an afterthought.

There is a beach towel too, draped on the fence in case one spills all over oneself in the joy of it all. Which of course happens quite regularly here at the lemonade stand, while elsewhere, casualties of human kindness seem to litter the crowded summer streets.

Penelope Pease is a Pease by marriage but also by birth. Chatting with her recently on a hot Sunday morning she said that when she and her future husband Marshall Pease first thought about dating, her father put the brakes on the relationship until he could thoroughly check the genealogy. It is a small Island after all, especially for two people with the same name.

It turned out Marshall and Penny were related, descended from brothers 14 generations before. Penny’s father thought that this was enough time to thin the bloodline, and the relationship was approved.

But still there was one drawback, Mrs. Pease said, her eyes still twinkling in her late 80s.“I didn’t get to change my last name when I got married. I’ve always been sad about that.”

He used to wear turquoise wristbands and dance until dawn. She used to play bawdy baroque violin sets in seedy city bars.

He ran late night laps around a track in Taiwan in nothing but his socks and sneakers, and spent a night in jail because of it. She spent many nights in jail, theowner of a righteous rap sheet for being a social justice warrior.

He used to be afraid of nothing except snapping turtles. She used to watch the ground carefully to steer clear of ants and beetles and other living things.

They made a date at a funeral, walked down the aisle together and honeymooned in a convent.

But where are they now, those people you talk about, their children asked.

Standing right in front of you, they said. But you have to close your eyes to see them.

What to do when a baby raccoon gets stuck in your fence? This was the conundrum faced by a few neighbors in East Chop. The poor fellow had somehow wedged his paws into a crack in the fence and couldn’t get out. His crying drew a small crowd.

At first they tried pulling at the fence. No dice. More crying. Then a carpenter walked by. The crowd and the raccoon begged him for help.

Standing gingerly, the man disassembled part of the fence, working carefully so as to not damage the raccoon or his calves which were within biting distance. Just before pulling out the last piece of wood everyone walked away to a safe distance in case the raccoon went wild and attacked his liberators.

No worries, the poor fellow’s paws were so numb he could only limp away to squat in the shade. For a long time he stayed there, looking at his paws, shaking his paws and licking his paws.

And then suddenly he was gone, and all was quiet except for the celebration of a job well done.

There are ghosts out there if you stop long enough to let them in.

While wandering through Oak Bluffs a man calls out to say hello from inside the Information Booth. It is an old man,seated on what appears to be a throne of comfortable relaxation amid a heavy current of tourists. Some stop to ask questions. Others to pass the time. Others walk by without noticing.

Old men often inhabit this booth. They know the town, the history, and they relish the chance to share it. They have the time too, at least for now. There is turnover in these booths. But thankfully memories never turn over. They only deepen, to the point where the voice today recalls another voice, now quieted, that used to call out from this booth. And for a brief, wonderful moment that voice speaks again, making the journey from ghost to flesh, even waving from a red kayak bobbing just offshore.

It is just a momentary glimpse, but it is enough on a hot July day to make everything feel possible again.

There is a saying that March comes in like a lamb and goes out like a lion or vice versa. And April is the cruelest month. But what of August, which officially arrived yesterday but many have felt it arrived in July this year, due to the heat and heavily trafficked streets?

August does lean more to the hot, heavy and hectic, which can sound sensuous if looked at from one direction, or rather daunting from another. It does a bit of a fade-out too, as college kids leave the Island mid-month and then the families follow at the end, until by September the place is more like a trickle than a waterfall.

So there you have it — August is the month that arrives full flower like a sailor on shore leave, and leaves like a first date, rather quiet and unsure of what to say. Yes, that will do, at least for today.

It’s a summer tradition, the Gazette edition that arrives free in every Island mailbox the first week of August. But on Friday morning when the paper surfaces, what one doesn’t see is the scene on Thursday night at 34 South Summer street in Edgartown.

The paper is a big one, and the print run huge. How huge? Approximately 150 miles of paper will be printed, and there’s not enough room indoors to store it all.

Davis Lane, just outside the press room, is lined with carts all the way to the corner, holding the newspapers. But that’s the static part of the night. Inside the building, usually until 2 or 3 in the morning, the place is a hive of activity as the staff, the interns, friends, relatives, some dogs but oddly no cats, all roll up their sleeves and secure their flip flops to help fold, stack, feed and inspire.

The light from the press room shines out into the otherwise dark street and like moths, diners and drinkers from Main street are drawn to it. So are neighbors who come by to pick up a very early copy of the news. It’s an old-fashioned affair, full of ink stained hands and shoulder to shoulder camaraderie.

Fear not those who only read online. Every single one of these 46 pages is on our website too. We hope you enjoy this year’s edition as much as we enjoyed creating it.

It is now deep summer, that time of year when the first swim seems so long ago, and the green of the snap peas just a memory in the face of a red tomato decorated with a dash of salt and a splash of olive oil.

Remember long pants? Neither do we. A mask and snorkel hold court now, center stage.

And yet not far around the next bend September looms like a clear slate. New school years, of course, offer up opportunities for mystery and renewal. And this doesn’t have to end just because exams and semesters are a thing of the past. January wins the title of resolutions made, which always seems so calculated like a chore. But

September shifts feel casual, a whisper of a new direction, and therefore more personal and timeless too.

It’s early August and you know who you are. But come September, don’t let that hold you back.

We interrupt this regularly scheduled broadcast to talk about ticks. Well, not really to talk about ticks, but to begin to talk about them. In conjunction with the Martha’s Vineyard Boards of Health, the Gazette is conducting an online survey on ticks, Lyme disease and other tick-borne illnesses.

Please take a moment to fill out the anonymous survey: vineyardgazette.com/tick-survey.

The Notebook will return on Tuesday, in its regularly scheduled time slot.

A man walks unsuspecting into the future, simply by attending a Built on Stilts performance. His daughter performs in the youngest troupe of dancers. It is cute and sweet but as the show progresses the man’s mood deepens.

Most of the dancers in the show are female, and represent many different age ranges. At about the midway mark he starts to see his daughter’s face in all of the various performers, from tween to teen, to twenty and thirty-something, middle age, old age and beyond. He is riveted, watching his daughter metaphorically mature in front of his eyes. Then his thoughts turn to his own mortality. Which of these stages will he witness and which will he not?

When the show is over, father and daughter walk hand in hand through the dark and quiet streets of Oak Bluffs. And although he does not share his thoughts with his daughter he notices she is holding onto his hand more tightly than usual, as if she really had danced through the decades and is afraid to let him go.

Summer is the season of hello and goodbye. June welcomes new and old faces. August bids them adieu. There are tears on porches, at the ferry, over the phone, by text, on the beach and probably at sea too. There are also tears at the Vineyard Gazette today — if hardened reporters and editors actually shed tears, that is.

Today is the last day for summer editorial interns Louisa McCullough and Mike Kotsopoulos. Louisa heads off to her first year at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Mike returns to Boston College for his senior year.

Readers know Louisa and Mike from their writing and their stories. Here at the Gazette we also know them for their character, humor and grace under pressure, whether facing a looming deadline or inserting paperslong past midnight.

The newsroom will feel somewhat empty come Monday without their youthful presence; there is no way around that. But their words will alwayslinger.

The Gazette thanks Louisa and Mike and wishes them both well on the next chapter in their ongoing stories.

While driving up-Island on Monday morning, a truck hauling a fair ride passes in the other lane, headed down-Island to the ferry boat and then to some other small town to resurrect the festival yet again. There was an urge, for a moment or maybe longer, to turn the wheel and follow. Who has not wondered at least once what it would be like to run away and join the circus?

Edward Hoagland, a writer now living quietly in Edgartown, once had that thought and actually acted on it as a young man. And so it was that the morning’s musing turned to this friend and mentor to pay tribute and mark this mood of wanderlust.

Overnight, the magic cavalcade vanished to another state, another climate. We have the gimpy, haywire gene as well, the one that makes you want to hit the road each spring while you last — a hail-fellow who knows that nothing is for keeps. You do your thing, to justwhatever tattoo of music and battery of lights are available to you, survive today, sleep it off, and get up on that wire again tomorrow.

The water temperature in the Edgartown Harbor dropped this week from 78 to 77, not a huge decrease but a sign nevertheless. There are other signs too, literal ones advertising sales on picnic baskets and beach related items, that speak of cool nights and shoulder season fashions.

The streets are changing their look too, beginning to wear their years younger and older, as the in-between college kids have mostly sailed off into the academic sunset. It was supposed to last longer, but then again it never does.

But it is not melancholy, even in the midst of goodbye, that stands center stage. Two more Gazette interns head off today, Alyssa Lodge to teach in France, and McKinley Sanders to study at Suffolk University. They, like other friends made this summer, will be remembered not for their absence but for their presence, which made the office brighter these past few months.

Like those favorite cousins one can’t wait to see again, they are now related to the paper — to the deadlines and deliveries, the late night printing and early morning coffees. They may leave like so many others depart at the end of summer, but not really. Summer may be short, but it always returns.

The echo of cicadas rings through the air, a cool wind blows in the morning and a child ponders his three-ringed binders wondering whether they can make the cut for another school year. Pencils lay sharpened all in a row, new shorts and shirts are at hand, while new teachers are still a foggy future.

A father watches his son prepare, and sees himself in that very seat so many years ago. Mostly, he sees the faces of all his teachers, the long line of adults standing at the front of the classroom. He sees himself grow taller in relation to his teachers, from looking up as a kindergartner to finally seeing eye to eye. He also sees his daydreams grow from Superman to the girl seated a few rows back.

He wonders for a moment if teachers in turn see all the faces of their students, a much more crowded memory to be sure. If so, he hopes they can see him waving and saying thank you to each and every one of them.

Happy back to school preparations, to students, teachers and everyone else in between.

The sunny days did not feel right, but the dark sky and soft rain on the first day of September did. And so in the early morning hours he stood at the graveside for a visit, one year and two days after his friend’s farewell. He stood with his back to the road, feeling the eyes of those in passing cars watching him.

The bird feeder hanging from the holly tree nearby was half full, and the area filled with birdsong and honey bees. He sat down to talk with his friend for a bit, remembering not events but a face and a feeling.

Before he left, he picked a flower bud from the grave and put it in his pocket. Then throughout the day, at various intervals, he took the bud out and held it in his hand, each time remembering another event, as well as a face and a feeling.

The Squibnocket parking lot was packed on Monday afternoon. A few stayed in their cars, but most stood on the seawall looking out at the huge waves rolling in. There were no surfers on the water, but the birds were thick, diving into the stormy surf for an early dinner as minnows were tossed about.

Onshore, a bearded fellow exhibited some odd storm behavior by making numerous trips down to the beach, collecting four or five large rocks each time, and putting them in his car. It was unclear whether this was for ballast or summer of 2016 souvenirs.

At Menemsha Beach there was less activity outside the cars as the winds flung sand sideways like pellets of hail.

Ocean Park was similarly quiet; no people, dogs or kites to be seen outside of the cars. The gray, lonely day brought to mind mid-February, rather than a Labor Day storm to be.

Inland, small branches and twigs dotted the roads, but otherwise all was calm. At Fiddlehead Farm the last day sale sign was already tucked away on the porch. The doors were closed, a decade in business over and the parking lot empty except for a few leaves blowing in the wind.

Mr. Puggs is not a lovable canine seated by the fire wagging his tail. It’s the name of a coffee shop on Circuit avenue in Oak Bluffs. Its hours are infrequent and erratic; seeing the Open sign is a bit like finding a four leaf clover.

A lucky sort, The Notebook recently wandered in. Mr. Puggs was behind the counter fixing up coffees and frozen drinks. A man named Frank stopped by to sing him a song. Frank busks in the center of town by the post office. Mr. Puggs claims he has a much better voice than Frank. “The other day I was singing in here and a man and a woman started dancing.”

Perhaps there is a real name for Mr. Puggs, but who really wants to know that. In any case, he has a unique take on doing business. He dislikes crowds and so doesn’t open his coffee shop in the morning, preferring to wait until afternoon when the rush for caffeine is over. “Too much business makes me stressed,” he says.

It was a refreshing thought after an especially busy summer that is now beginning to close up shop. Sort of like a delicious shot of espresso in the late afternoon.

On Sunday, in the parking lot of Cronig’s, two men shake hands. They have not seen each other since last winter at the weekly community suppers. Oddly enough, they never see each other anywhere else on the Island, and so this surprise meeting at the cusp of September feels like a gift.

One of the men wears a baseball cap, not to shield the sun’s glare, but to cover his head, bald now after six chemotherapy treatments.

“It’s a team sport, it really is,” the man with the cap says, his handshake firm and the color in his face robust. “And my team is great, that’s why I’m still here.”

The men talk for a bit more and then part. While walking away the man without the cap looks up at the sunny sky and for the first time that day remembers it is the anniversary of 9/11. He wonders how he could have forgotten such a thing.

Then he looks down at his grocery list and decides instead to keep walking for as long as it takes to remember everything.

As the second week of school on the Vineyard comes to a close, some of the excitement of being back is now tempered by the shock of having to get up early each morning. September has also brought with it cool mornings, and thus the return of blankets to burrow into.

One young girl, upon being urged to wake up, decided a change of species might offer a perfect excuse.

“I’m a baby flying squirrel,” she said. “We’re nocturnal. I’ll see you tonight.”

While standing on the beach, casting his line out into the surf, a man remembers the biggest one he ever caught: his younger brother. They were out in a boat, just the two of them for the first time without adults. They had tried casting, trolling, lures, bait, cursing the water and sky, but they couldn’t find even a nibble.

He decided on one final cast, heaved with the determination of hours of frustration, and therefore forgetting to turn around to make sure all was clear. He caught his brother in the side of the head, the hook anchored so deeply that the line screamed as if there was a big fish on the line. The brother screamed too.

Later, back on shore and in the hospital, a doctor shaved the young boy’s head, numbed the skull, clipped the hook, and pushed it out the opposite way from the barb. All was well, except for the shaved head, a small scar, and a lifetime of teasing about the big one that refused to go away.

A woman at the Gay Head Lighthouse said they were swallows. Another woman staring up at them, watching the flock dart back and forth in the sky as one, said they looked liked schoolkids during recess.

The birds, thousands of them, made shapes in the sky — twisting, twirling shapes as they zigged and zagged about. It looked like fun up there, but it was also work. The cliffs are a staging ground for long migrations. One day soon the aerial game of tag will end, and for the swallows the hard journey south will begin.

Yesterday was the first day of fall. As a whole, we humans do not migrate, but there is of course a Vineyard migration as the Island empties and takes a new shape. For some it is beautiful, for others it can be a hard journey, especially come winter. Here’s hoping for gentle, yet steady tailwinds for all those who remain and for all those who take flight.

While walking through the woods he became aware of how quiet it was, not silent but the type of quiet that moves from one small sound to the next — a bird calling, the rustle of leaves in the wind or beneath a forest creature’s scuttling claws, a car passing in the road, a lawn mower, a splash. One after another, sometimes merging, sometimes politely waiting for one sound to exit before another took center stage, the sounds made a polite chorus.

The quiet followed him home, to the porch, to inside the house and to later that night. Each time it was a different type of quiet that brushed up against him, asking him where he had been.

I’ve been right here, he said. Couldn’t you hear me?

Long pants are back as are jackets and sweaters, while shorts disappear against a backdrop of birds flying south. The leaves seem frightened, as do the thin pipes of the outdoor shower — one frost to freeze them all.

The water temperature fell below 70 degrees, registering 66 on Thursday morning in the Edgartown Harbor.

The slow cooker raises its hand from the cupboard, the firewood asks for a return to the throne, and the thick blanket sneezes from too much time spent inside the musty closet.

October arrives, September fades, but for now there is still time after dinner to walk down the lane, hand in hand, with the setting sun.

The rain that was needed so badly finally came, great sheets of it, slanting across old farm fields, slowly refilling streams and ponds that had been reduced to caked mudholes by the long summer drought. The dog stood silently at the kitchen door, gazing out through water-streaked glass. Brown, stubbly meadows were turning green again, but the tiny wild asters that usually bloom in such profusion are missing this autumn. Their root systems are deep and ancient, though, so they’re not gone.

Maybe next year.

Then the rain stopped, but it was too soon. The dog saw a rabbit, but it was too late.

Who doesn’t love a gleaner? For the uninitiated, gleaners are volunteers who go out and scour Island farm fields for every last bit of produce left behind during the harvest. They fill their bushel baskets and pickup trucks with vegetables of every description — corn, kale, tomatoes, potatoes, sweet peppers and eggplant — later delivering it to schools, councils on aging and the various groups that help people who are hungry, homeless or lacking enough income to buy groceries. Think about thousands of pounds of nutritious, healthy produce that might otherwise be plowed under going to help feed people who need it the most.

The Vineyard has the Island Grown Initiative to thank for this program. But the real stars are the gleaners. Ladies and gentlemen, please put your hands together for them.

Several days ago Hurricane Matthew wreaked devastation on the Caribbean island of Haiti, and a small group on the Vineyard has sprung into action, raising money to help the people on Ile a Vache, a tiny island off the tip of Haiti. Ile a Vache already shares a bond with Martha’s Vineyard; two years ago Nat and Pam Benjamin of Vineyard Haven sailed their sturdy schooner Charlotte down to Haiti, loaded to the gunwales with donated supplies. If you missed Nat’s elegantly-written log of that journey, published in the Martha’s Vineyard Magazine, you can find it here. It’s all the inspiration needed to give a little to help the people of Ile a Vache, who have seen their homes and their way of life wiped out by a single hurricane. With the threat of cholera looming, Nat and Pam aim to send a generator-operated portable device down to Ile a Vache that can help make fresh, potable water.

October has its benchmarks. Day shrinks to night by suppertime these days, and temperatures fall quickly as a waxing moon rises in the east. The full moon is Sunday. The derby ends. Winter hours on the Chappaquiddick ferry begin. A child who just yesterday was a chubby baby turns thirty nine. Where did the years go? A mother wonders.

A man sits beside a river with his young daughter by his side. It is early morning, the sun still shaking of its bedcovers. The girl sketches the scene as best she can. It is a new pastime and she has a new pencil in her hand, a new sketchbook, a new eraser, and a new look of determination the father has not noticed before.

“I want to draw you next,” she says and the man smiles and breathes in the scene. He looks at the reflections in the water, of buildings and sunlight and trees. Overhead, birds fly in a large group, calling out to him.

There are perfect moments out there, always waiting to be noticed. He understands that this is one of them. But he also wonders about the many others he has missed lately. Somehow, along the way, he had become too comfortable with the idea of how hard it is to be a parent, and this had begun to edge out the joy of it. He sees this so clearly now that for a moment he can’t stop shaking. But then his daughter grabs him by the arm.

“Hold still,” she says. “I’m new at this.”

“Me too,” he thinks. “Me too.”

While walking through a park the other day a different sort of sight is noticed. It seems everywhere there are pregnant women taking part in photo shoots. There are several separate groups, remarkable in their similarities — each contains three people (the couple and a photographer), with the mom-to-be far along and wearing a tight, brightly colored dress. One woman holds a pair of blue baby booties, which she rests on her stomach for the picture. The image brings to mind a tiny, invisible ski-jumper about to take off down a long curvaceous slope.

The metaphor is palpable; a whole lot of hope and mystery out there in the park, lifting off from the earth and soaring through the air.

Good luck ladies. Good luck babies. Good luck everyone everywhere.

While calm horizons on a summer day are pleasant to look at, a roiling sea feels more suited to fall. The distance to the mainland feels more pronounced when the barrier is tempestuous, and somehow in the off-season this can feel comforting. It is as if the ocean has decreed it is okay to settle in, to listen to the cool winds blowing and forget the wider world, at least for a moment. Turning inward feels more natural, as does looking back in time to one’s very first encounter with the sea.

As a guide on this journey, here is the English writer Laurie Lee in his memoir As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning.

A few miles from Southampton I saw the real sea at last, head on, a sudden end to the land, a great sweep of curved nothing rolling out to the invisible horizon and revealing more distance than I’d ever seen before. It was green, and heaved gently like the skin of a frog, and carried drowsy little ships like flies. Compared with the land, it appeared to be a huge hypnotic blank, putting everything to sleep that touched it.

It began in the Gazette newsroom, earlier this week. Three people were in the room, quietly working hard. A loud sigh was heard, the type that speaks to something much deeper than mere exhaustion. All three people looked up from their desks in the direction of the noise to see who had sighed. There was no one sitting at that desk, and each person denied sighing or saying anything. A chill ran through their collective spines.

The next day, one of the men was at home, where for the moment he lives with no one else. It was dark out and he stepped into the shower after a workout. While standing under the running water he noticed his toothbrush resting on the soap dish. He does not brush his teeth in the shower and although he tried to tell himself maybe he had brought his toothbrush into the shower, he knew this was not true. A chill ran up his spine and after toweling off he checked every corner and closet of the house. Then he locked the doors for the first time in years.

Before going to bed, he threw the toothbrush into the bathroom wastebasket. The next morning, when he woke up, it was gone.

The older man, an octogenarian now, smoked three Camel cigarettes while they talked. The younger man smoked none. The older man drank black coffee; the younger man asked for milk with his.

The two men sat together for over an hour, discussing the older man’s new book and his life. The man had, in some sense, lived through the golden age of newspapers, had even been wounded in Viet Nam while on assignment. His novel was both an homage and an elegy to the business and craft of newspapers.

The younger man asked questions and listened, and in his head was already writing the lead to the piece he would write. He was also marveling that this was considered work, after all he was paid to be here. But really, he knew, if anyone had asked he would have gladly paid to be there.

On the morning after a late and exhilarating seventh game of the World Series, two men talked not of baseball but of war. Both had seen action and they discussed the harrowing immediacy of battle — the shrapnel flying, the noise, and the difference between the calm voice of a fighter pilot coming over the radio and the panicked cries on the ground.

All this took place at a post office on the Island, while fog still shrouded the streets. One eavesdropper completed the scene, a man who had never experienced the world they discussed.

Walking back out into the fog, the man let his mind drift back to baseball for no other reason than the rest of the world felt so out of control.

On Monday the skies were gray, the air cold, but otherwise all was calm. A few orange leaves floated to the ground, a rabbit crossed the road and some turkeys did not. It was all so peaceful, and for a moment it was almost possible to forget that the next day was election day. Almost.

Fear not, the Notebook will not tread where so many have gone before. Everything and more has already been said and said again. Instead, it will look off into the distance to ponder the sighting this weekend of a common raven, a rarity here on the Island. What does it mean, if anything, the arrival of this large black bird made so famously forboding by Edgar Allan Poe?

Perhaps the answer lies in another forboding phrase, misquoted here: do not ask for whom the ballot box calls, it calls for you.

On Wednesday, in the quiet of the early morning, a man went looking for his better self. He thought he caught a glimpse of him hiding behind a tree, ducking behind a large stone, waving from a distant shore.

Why so elusive he wondered while pushing onward, deeper into the stillness as a fog settled in around him. He stopped walking, climbed a particularly solid looking tree with sturdy limbs, and from a high perch searched again. But the fog stayed thick, the air cooled, a crow mocked him and three squirrels pelted him with acorns.

Eventually, the man climbed down and walked out of the woods with a heavy sigh. There would be no better self on this day.

A man sits on a chimney, high in the air, as casually as one might lounge in a chair in front of the television. He plumbs the length of the chimney with a long pole, cleaning it and calling out to his co-worker, who is inside the home and out of view.

Later on, presumably if all goes well, the owner of the house will bring in wood and light a fire. She will pour a drink, put her feet up and stare into the flames, thinking deeply about her life. And because it has been a good one, she will cry, her tears warm from the heat of the fire, but with no one nearby to dry them.

Two brown cows rest in the grass chewing their cud. It appears they don’t have much to say to each other as they enjoy a quiet respite from hectic lives at the farm. Overhead, the sky is a light gray, a color that often signals snow but it is not cold enough yet.

At the ocean’s edge, one bird pauses in the sand but another does not, preferring to take to the air until it becomes just a black dot in the sky. The water is calm, just a few ripples. In the distance, the mainland seems to hover on the horizon like a large piece of toast.

It is a day where not much seems to be happening, but of course that is not true. Down at the harbor, Rock & Roll, Munchkin and Sea Raven snuggle up to each other, drifting casually in their moorings, the waves brushing their hulls in soft, wet kisses.

A woman stands in line at the grocery store, a place that can often be similar to an elevator, where many people gather but don’t speak to each other. Perhaps it is the boundary of other people’s food that sometimes gets in the way of conversation.

The woman adheres to this time-honored quiet space, thinking to herself about the list of things she needs to do to prepare for Thanksgiving. But then her eyes drift to the purchases of the woman standing in front of her. Nestled among the canned goods and bread, the milk and potatoes and other household goods, is a bouquet of bright yellow flowers.

“They look so pretty,” the woman says to the customer in front of her.

Later, after she has bought and bagged her own groceries, she turns to see the other woman still standing there, with the bouquet of flowers in her hand. “These are for you,” the stranger says. “I realized I had bought them for you.

Last Saturday, two couples headed out to the regional high school to watch the Vineyard play Nantucket in the Island Cup. They left the house early to get a good parking spot. They were surprised when they arrived to discover they were the first ones there.

They parked and found a perfect spot in the bleachers, right at the 50-yard line, down in front. They sat wrapped in blankets and huddling a bit in the cold. They were still the only ones there; no fans or players or signs of any activity, except for a few hawks circling up above and a lone deer pausing at the edge of the field.

Eventually, they realized they had come to the game a week too early. When asked if they would return the next week to watch the actual game, they said they weren’t sure. In the end, they had stayed at the field for over an hour, watching the deer and the hawks and the empty field. It was so calming, they said, to sit in the bleachers watching nothing at all. Perhaps they would wait until the week after the game, they said, and return to the empty field and watch it some more.

It was to be the most fabulous Thanksgiving dessert ever — a cranberry curd tart. It took two days to make, under watchful eyes for nearly the entire 48 hours. The maker and the creation had become nearly one on this road to completion, as it should be.

On the big day there was a procession out to the car; so many bags of lesser things also making the journey to the feast. She put the cranberry curd tart on the roof of the car while packing the rest in the trunk. The crown jewel was to ride alongside her, strapped in the passenger seat by a seat belt cushioned with several pink pillows. But with all the packing, and all the primping of the pillows, somehow the tart was forgotten and never made it off the roof, until sometime during the drive, perhaps on a hard left turn or a long straightway.

The tart was never found, at least by the humans who went looking for it in several search parties. But later that evening, The Notebook discovered some flecks of crust among a diverse group of woodland friends — four chipmunks, three rabbits and two skunks. They were all rubbing their swollen bellies outside their burrows and giving thanks for the finest dessert they had ever eaten.

While his family is away, a man takes an illustration to a frame shop. The drawing was done many years ago by a friend. It is of a mother putting her two young children to bed. All are smiling, there are kid drawings on the wall held in place by tape, a small nightlight rests by the beside table, and the little girl’s socks have stars on them.

When he picks it up a few days later, the woman at the store almost hugs him, she is so happy with the result. “I love all the precise details,” she says. “But why is the mother bald, with just that one very long hair growing out of her head?”

“She has breast cancer,” the man says. “After the chemo, only that one tough hair remained.”

The woman takes a breath and then asks quietly, “And how is everything now?”

The man pauses for a moment, remembering everything about that time. Could it really have been almost five years ago, he wonders. He turns to the woman. “It is wonderful now,” he says.

This time the woman does hug him. It is a robust hug, and at first the man flinches. But then he gives in to it, and when he begins to sob and cannot stop, he is not ashamed.

A man walks into a room full of friends he has known for decades. It is a friend’s birthday party and the hundred or so faces in front of him are as familiar as his own face in the mirror.

How odd, he thinks, that so much thought when young is given to what path life will take, but that so little planning is given to who will walk that road together — not as a spouse, but as friends, the bedrock, really, of any life. The connections just seem to unfold, and through the years come and go depending on circumstances and proximity. But the warm feeling never ebbs.

He wades into the crowd filled with smiles, hugs and handshakes. And as the music plays and the birthday girl begins to dance, he gives up on gravity and for a moment floats above the earth, looking down at a much younger version of himself, still scared of the future and what it might hold. How he wishes he could show him this scene to show him what really matters.

Early Thursday morning, while waiting for a school bus, a little girl spins in her driveway arms outstretched, hair horizontal, and then flies away just before her bus arrives. Further on down the road, a corral of goats stand up when they think no one is looking and trade a poison ivy breakfast for a round of morning martinis.

In town, a rheumatic rabbit sits on a park bench reading a thick volume of Uncle Wiggly stories, with a large hawk perched on his shoulder. Up the street, a plump old man with a gray beard enters a yoga studio and remarks to the class he needs to limber up in preparation for flying a sleigh pulled by a team of reindeer.

It’s December. Hope springs eternal, everywhere.

At dusk, a burst of sunset pokes its way through a gray wall of clouds. A small boy parks his bicycle and looks up at the sunset. Two tall trees are up there too, scratching the roof of the sky with their bare branches. Nearby a group of boats docked at the harbor’s edge are unsettled by a single wave. The noise seems to frighten the boy and he flees the scene.

All is quiet now. Then a soft wind rolls in, bringing with it the memory of friends, gone but suddenly present in the wind and waves and the gathering darkness. It is a thin time, when the streets can become crowded this way. In the past he may have run too, like the small boy, but now he stays and says hello, hoping they all know how much he misses them.

I like snow because it makes footsteps, she said.

I like snow because when I close my eyes I see polar bears, he said.

I like snow because when I run though the woods naked on a snowy night I know I am alive, she said.

Really? he asked.

Really, she said.

Me too.

On an otherwise uneventful day a man picks his young daughter up from school. She is with a friend and they tell him they have something very serious to discuss. The subject has been building for a year, they say.

The man nods, having no idea what he will soon face. Sort of how he feels every day as a parent.

Back home the girls disappear upstairs. When they return they throw a piece of folded paper at him and run back upstairs.

It takes a few moments to unpack the note. He spreads it out on the kitchen counter and looks at his daughter’s handwriting, done in bold red strokes with a few misspellings. On one side it reads: “Dear Dad, we have been wanting to tell you this for a while.” He flips the note over. “We don’t belive in Santa.”

The man takes a deep breath, not sure what to do next. He walks upstairs, hears giggles under the bed that quickly turn to tears. He walks his daughter into the next room and holds her while she sobs and asks him if he still loves her, now that she is growing up and doesn’t believe.

Of course he says, love never goes away and neither does Santa, not really. When you get older Santa becomes more of a feeling than a person you can touch — a feeling of mystery and generosity that is just as magical as a sleigh landing on the roof.

The traditions don’t have to change either, he adds. Cookies for Santa and carrots for his reindeer will still be set out by the fireplace. Only now we get to eat the cookies before we go to bed.

Thanks Dad, his daughter says after drying her eyes. This is a huge weight off me.

The high school kids in town are now college students, back for holiday break and barely recognizable. A young man wears his hair much longer, a young woman cuts hers very short in a stylish crewcut.

Further on down the road, a group of toddlers suddenly leap out of their strollers and become adolescents. Down a quiet side street , a senior citizen sags under the layers of his years. Just yesterday, it seemed, he could bench press the entire block with ease.

The holidays can be like that, anchoring the passing of time with a clarity that catches at the heart.

Riding the wave, he visits with his younger self, always a popular destination, but finds he has nothing new to say. And so he heads to the future, that blank canvas calling from the horizon. The wind is up, the water rough, but a deep yearning guides the way.

Instead of resolutions, The Notebook prefers moments. For example, may you be driving along the road as grammar school lets out and get caught behind a school bus that stops every hundred yards or so. But instead of irritation may you feel elation. After all, the sight of the future, dressed in princess backpacks and spiderman hats will always be more beautiful than checking off another errand.

May you wave back at an ocean wave and later that afternoon stare longingly at a blade of grass while chewing on a twig.

May you pass by a construction site and hear Stairway to Heaven as if for the first time.

And finally, may you go to sleep one night pondering what it means to be a snapping turtle, that shy, misunderstood descendent of dinosaurs, watching from its pond perch among the murky depths as the human race slowly swims by.

Happy New Year. May it be joyous, peaceful and full of fragile humility.

Directory

Sections

Towns

Notebook Archive - 2016

Directory

Sections

Towns

Notebook Archive - 2016

Friday, January 1

Tuesday, January 5

Friday, January 8

Tuesday, January 12

Friday, January 15

Tuesday, January 19

Friday, January 22

Tuesday, January 26

Friday, January 29

Tuesday, February 2

Friday, February 5

Tuesday, February 9

Friday, February 12

Tuesday, February 16

Friday, February 19

Tuesday, February 23

Friday, February 26

Tuesday, March 1

Friday, March 4

Tuesday, March 8

Friday, March 11

Tuesday, March 15

Tuesday, March 15

Friday, March 18

Tuesday, March 22

Saturday, March 26

Tuesday, March 29

Friday, April 1

Tuesday, April 5

Friday, April 8

Tuesday, April 12

Friday, April 15

Tuesday, April 19

Friday, April 22

Tuesday, April 26

Friday, April 29

Tuesday, May 3

Friday, May 6

Tuesday, May 10

Friday, May 13

Tuesday, May 17

Friday, May 20

Tuesday, May 24

Friday, May 27

Tuesday, May 31

Friday, June 3

Tuesday, June 7

Friday, June 10

Tuesday, June 14

Friday, June 17

Tuesday, June 21

Friday, June 24

Tuesday, June 28

Friday, July 1

Tuesday, July 5

Friday, July 8

Tuesday, July 12

Friday, July 15

Tuesday, July 19

Friday, July 22

Tuesday, July 26

Friday, July 29

Tuesday, August 2

Friday, August 5

Tuesday, August 9

Friday, August 12

Tuesday, August 16

Friday, August 19

Tuesday, August 23

Friday, August 26

Tuesday, August 30

Friday, September 2

Tuesday, September 6

Friday, September 9

Tuesday, September 13

Friday, September 16