The Vineyard Gazette - Martha's Vineyard News

January ↓
February ↓
March ↓
April ↓
May ↓
June ↓
July ↓
August ↓
September ↓
October ↓
November ↓
December ↓

This is the year of please and thank you, a mother tells her young children on the first day of 2018. Of listening and turning the lights off when leaving the room. It is the year of resolving to be kind and thoughtful, just for the heck of it, to people, places and snapping turtles too.

It is the year of walking in another’s footsteps, be they shoes, sneakers, boots, paws, talons or claws. Of pausing to linger a bit longer for no reason at all.

It is the year of lying down in the grass at night, under the stars, especially on frigid evenings, the perfect place and time for dreaming so many possible dreams.

Early in the New Year, skaters took to the ponds, and a sailor walked out on the ice to check his boat on Lake Tashmoo. By Thursday, when the rains came, the Edgartown Harbor was unreachable, too much water in the way, and the weekly water temperature had to be taken from a large puddle in the parking lot.

Elsewhere cabin fever reigned, with occasional moments of good cheer. A father smiled, thinking this was such a moment as he watched his young daughter play with her tribe of small, plastic unicorns. To him they seemed such an agreeable bunch, full of color and community. The young girl saw it otherwise. Evidently, the daddy unicorn was out of sorts. “You are a mean and nasty father,” the girl said, using her best police unicorn voice, before hauling him off to a makeshift jail in the bookshelf.

The man’s face fell, knowing a moment of transference when he saw one, with him as the lead villain. Perhaps he should have added, be nicer to family, on his list of New Year’s resolutions.

He knelt down and asked whether the daddy unicorn had any chance of getting out for good behavior. “Doesn’t look good,” the little girl said. “Doesn’t look good at all.”

It is mid-winter and a polar freeze squeezing hard, and yet a man decides the mirror needs a change of scenery. He shaves his face on a whim, erasing a thick mustache and minor beard. Afterwards, when walking outside, his lips chap and his cheeks howl for protection.

Back inside it is even worse. His children stare at him in horror.

You look boring, one says, and you’re not as funny now either. The other child shakes his head slowly, an eerie vision of a parent in deep disappointment. You’ve lost your soul, he says.

The man walks back outside, deciding his chances with four degrees and subzero wind chill will be much less biting.

A man walks to the water’s edge, a warm day beckoning after a deep freeze. The snow has melted, mostly, and the sand is back. The waves too are free of the icy slush, although a hangover seems to linger in the way they fall listlessly on the sand.

The man thinks for a moment that he misses the cold, a test to face each morning, to wake him with a frigid slap on an otherwise comfortable day. But then he remembers this is not the case for everyone, able to grab a brief glimpse before heading back to the warmth of indoor living. He also remembers the hawk, driven hungry no doubt by the cold and snow. It came out of the sky without warning, diving on the backyard chickens huddled beneath the rhododendron bush, their usual fortress against attack. One had lingered too long in the open and was killed immediately.

They are his daughter’s chickens. He told her when she returned from school, after she had talked to him about her day and had a snack. She ran outside to the coop, crying and wailing, her bare feet sliding on the ice: “This is an awful thing to say but I hope it was Chloe. She was my least favorite.”

It was Maxie, one of her favorites, although not the top of her pecking order. There are still tears, each night before bed.

The man looks at the ocean and shudders as if the cold were back again. The body still lies under the wheelbarrow, awaiting burial now that the ground is soft again. Tomorrow, he thinks. Tomorrow will be the right day.

In Aquinnah a fire roars outside, tended 24 hours a day for those wanting to pay their respects and offer their love. A young man of the tribe has died, and this ritual will help carry him home. The ashes of the fire and the spirit of the offerings will travel with him to his final resting place.

The air is cold and the sky is gray. Snow flurries dance in the shadows as people come and go. In the silence the fire speaks in heated whispers that float above the trees before vanishing in the sky.

It is quiet down at the harbor on a sunny afternoon in late January. Waves chase each other to the shoreline, a few birds circle listlessly in the air, and a single boat, riding low in the water, motors to the pier. The boat is filled with bay scallops, a full day’s haul.

Two scallopers unload the catch, weighing down the back of a pickup truck. The scallops look tasty, even from this side of the shell, still wet with saltwater and green with algae.

“They thought about raising the quota, but I’m glad they didn’t,” one scalloper says. “It would have messed with the prices.”

He carries another bushel to the truck, his waders rubbing together, the only sound it seems out there on the dock. He shakes his head and says, “but they did something even worse, they let us scallop on Saturdays now. I want to be with my kids on Saturdays, but I gotta go out if I can.”

With that he starts his truck and drives off to the fish store to settle the day’s accounts. As he leaves he shouts out the window, “Hey, I may have left the boat motor running, could you turn it off for me?”

She is having trouble sleeping, the young daughter. But it has been going on for months and the father is tired. She calls him in yet again, to review the day, to discuss why clouds seem to go only side to side and not up and down, why grass is green and snow is white, and whether he prefers mermaids or unicorns.

Unicorns he says, explaining how a mermaid once took him for $50 in a seaside scam. The daughter looks confused. Nevermind, he says, and stop stalling. Goodnight, lights out, see you in the morning.

Ten minutes later she screams for him, saying there is a giant spider walking across the ceiling. The father returns, turns on the lights and sees nothing. This pattern repeats itself twice more. The father is nearing a rage. There is no spider, he shouts. You are making this up.

The daughter whimpers. But I keep seeing it, she says. The father sighs and as he does so he looks down, to where the nightlight is. He notices something. Upon closer inspection it is a small spider moving slowly around the nightlight’s perimeter, perhaps enjoying the warmth. The father turns off the overhead light and now sees the spider’s shadow, reflected on the ceiling, the size of a unicorn saddle.

I am so sorry, he says.

I told you so, she says.

While listening to his son play piano he is lifted off the couch and taken back in time, to sitting in a movie theatre decades ago. It was the middle of the day and he had come in for some courage. His life was about to change, as it had a habit of doing then. And yet he was always afraid too.

By the end of the movie he was weeping. It was a documentary about a musician who had died much too young. And now this, sitting on the couch listening to his son play a song from that movie.

How to explain the enormity of one’s journey — to his son, to himself, to anyone? He can’t, not in words. Instead, there is the image of that young man alone in a theatre, now watching that same movie with his family, his son leaning his head on his shoulder, his daughter drawing on the floor, and his wife weeping like she did when he first told her he loved her.

Rain played a steady drumbeat on the windows. There was strong coffee close at hand. And on a dreary Sunday in January, long-neglected bookshelves offered up their hidden treasures.

The World’s Best Orations in ten volumes. A thesaurus of humor. A thesaurus of epigrams. Two books about weeds. One Strunk and White. The Beach Plum Inn Cookbook. Pencil sketches by a former Gazette reporter dashed off on a yellow legal pad. A typed letter from a father to his son, found tucked inside The Complete Plain Words by Sir Ernest Gowers.

The distractions were endless. Was this cleaning or some other kind of journey?

And then the best of all: a previously undiscovered book by the nature essayist Hal Borland.

Orations would go, but Borland would stay, alongside a few others. Because there’s no such thing as too much Borland. Here is what he wrote about January:

“It’s January, all right; but January passes and April comes, always and forever. And those things rooted in the good earth make few mistakes. Before the leaf, comes the bud; and no bud is grown overnight.”

In January the music stopped. The Bose radio in the kitchen was suddenly silent. No Lyle Lovett. No Coltrane. No Sam Cook. No dancing in the kitchen. There was only a blanket of sadness and the silence that somehow felt right in the darkness.

Now it is February and light has begun to trickle in around the edges — in the kitchen and around the Island.

On Wednesday night the huge super moon rose up over Nantucket Sound and people from all corners of the Vineyard gathered on north-facing shorelines to gaze and take pictures and wonder at the mystical beauty. Along the seawall in Oak Bluffs, a woman clad in a thick parka knelt on cold pavement, holding her cell phone aloft in one hand. Her dog sat patiently at her side. It gave cause to wonder: what do dogs think of the super moon?

The wind and ruffled waves at odds with a perfect blue sky feel like a suitable metaphor for early February. The streets are quiet, the arguments sometimes not, when the Island turns its face to deep winter.

The growing season may have arrived, with 10 hours of daylight now the norm, and yet something about this peek at what lies around the corner, a mere page turn or two of the calendar, often hinders rather then helps the psyche.

All the more reason to pause rather than pounce at the slightest slight or to wonder why instead of reacting on the fly. Or better yet, walk down to the ocean’s edge and instead of hugging yourself to keep warm, do it for the fun of it.

A turkey lay dead in the road, hit by a car just moments earlier. Its feathers were everywhere, on the road and in the air, floating about like confetti. A large group of fellow turkeys looked confused, their wattles wagging, eyes darting back and forth, as they held their place in the road.

Two cars sat in witness, one from each direction, as the turkeys regrouped and began their march to safety on the other side.

Any death causes sadness, but one man found himself nearly undone in the early morning light. How many times had he stopped for a crossing of turkeys, a minor annoyance always transported into a march of oddly regal bearing?

Evidently the man in the other car felt the same way. They parked, stepped out of their cars and carried the body to the woods, where without exchanging names or saying much of anything to each other, gave their unknown friend a proper burial.

A father and his young daughter prepare to make Valentine’s Day cookies. The daughter is to be the lead. The father knows this because on the name tags she created for them, hers says Chef; his says Clark, Kitchen Assistant.

The father’s name is nowhere near Clark.

The father helps gather the ingredients and then watches closely as his daughter mixes them in a bowl. Too closely, evidently.

“Back off Clark, you’re crowding me,” his daughter tells him.

Clark does as he is told, realizing this is just the first of many times he will be judged as crowding his daughter. He only hopes that with good behavior Clark will get to sample some of the finished cookies.

The Edgartown water temperature hit 42 this week, a tender snowdrop in Vineyard Haven wandered up from underground and decided to stay, and an eager gardener showed off a galaxy of green shoots waving at her, it seemed, from inside her unheated greenhouse.

The effect was so optimistic a man decided to go in search of his better self, an ongoing game of hide and seek with the soul if you will. He took to the woods and the journey started out promising enough: a glimpse from behind an oak tree and another one up ahead at the bend in the pathway, but traveling in such a hurry. To where, he thought, picking up his pace in pursuit.

After that, there was nothing. Just the sounds of his eager footsteps and a squirrel mocking him with impunity from a branch nearby. In the sky a solitary hawk soared with a grandiose perplexity at the smallness of humans, which oddly enough made him feel better. Forgetting his search for a moment he lay down on the wet ground, closed his eyes and fell asleep.

As February rounds for home the Notebook pauses for a moment to take stock using as its compass a writer it admires. What better way to embrace a gray day full of longing it thinks.It turns to E.B. White, and his essay The Sea and The Wind That Blows, which opens as follows:I have noticed that most men, when they enter a baber shop and must wait their turn, drop into a chair and pick up a magazine. I simply sit down and pick up the thread of my sea wandering, which began more than fifty years ago and is not quite ended. There is hardly a waiting room in the East that has not served as my cockpit, whether I was waiting to board a train or to see a dentist. And I am usually still trimming sheets when the train starts or the drill begins to wine.Happy sailing in all its forms.

Faced with the quiet of the upcoming school break week on the Vineyard, the Notebook began pondering pinkletinks. What better way to embrace the hush of a nearly deserted Island than by experiencing the full-throated mating roar of a group of tiny amphibians? They have crawled out of the muck near Lambert’s Cove, and other ponds will soon follow.

Pinkletinks do not embarrass easily, announcing their lust for life and each other so loudly out on the ponds that no pop song in a passing car can outdo them. The Notebook parked and sat on a log nearby, a voyeur for inspiration, not to lie with another in the mud but to learn how, once again, to howl at the sun, moon and stars for the sheer joy of it. Remember how that once felt? If not, a moment pondside with some pinkletinks will help deliver the memory and so much more.

On the Island this week it is, as the old saying goes, so quiet you can hear a pin drop. So quiet you can hear yourself think. So quiet you can hear the sound of the tiny crocuses, jonquils and windflowers pushing up through the dark, damp earth on the south side of the old farmhouse where the front stoop faces a country road. The naturalizing bulbs were planted there late last November, right around the time when the warm fall air had begun to take on the knife edge of oncoming winter. The flowers were something to look forward to — later on, when the air began to soften again with the promise of spring.

Now you can hear it coming. Like a whisper.

Seen on the Vineyard this week:

People wearing no coats. People eating lunch outside. On the beaches, no people at all. But at the Mill Pond in West Tisbury, some otters were having a fine time swimming. Gazette photographer Bert Fischer happened to be there and took their picture. It’s on the front page of the Gazette today. (Something you might miss if you only read the Notebook.)

And now here comes March. Like a lion. Don’t put away those winter coats and gloves just yet.

Pictures tell the story. Gazette photographers were out in force during the severe northeast storm that pummeled the Vineyard all day and through the night Friday with hurricane-force winds, astronomical high tides and heavy rains. The sea crashing over seawalls, sailboats run aground, coastal roads turned into rivers, huge trees toppled like matchsticks — all became images for the Gazette website through the long, storm-tossed weekend. Citizen photographers were out too. One picture taken by Richard Knight of the Chappaquiddick ferry point under water had a record number of views on the Gazette’s Instagram page.

Thanks to all the photographers, amateur and otherwise, for their work. And to the readers for their enthusiastic response.

While driving, a father listens to his young daughter talking to herself. He can’t make out the words, just an endless stream of commentary with imaginary characters coming from the back seat. He smiles, happy to hear her creative flow bubbling so freely. She is, after all, nearing double digits and he knows these moments will eventually end. The sacred space of childhood feels fleeting.

She has a new game she likes to play called Big Girl, where she walks several steps ahead of him and he must pretend not to know her. She is on her own in the world and looks the part, her step more vigorous and sure, her shoulders back and her head held high. As they get out of the car, he thinks of this game, how it tugs at his heart while at the same time freeing hers.

What were you talking about, he asks, while we were driving? Did you travel to some imaginary land?

She looks at him with surprise. No, I was practicing my lines for the school play, she says. And then before he can respond she runs off to join her friends on the playground, the distance between the two of them growing larger until it is wide enough to fill a decade.

Between Daylight Saving Time and a large snowstorm, a man is visited by the neighborhood bunny, a wild rabbit that visits a few favorite homes in the neighborhood, bounding after the occupants like a very small puppy. It likes its ears rubbed and rump patted. The man considers the bunny the best pet ever.

But on this day, Alex (that is what his daughter named it) looks skittish. Instead of sitting still enjoying a caress, it stands on its hind legs pawing at the man’s pants. Then it runs around his feet, circling as if trying to tell him something.

He looks closer. There is a long line of fur missing, right down to the skin, but no blood. It’s just a newly created white scar. The man sits on the grass and Alex climbs into his lap. The two of them look out into the woods. A blizzard is approaching, but only the bunny knows what else lurks out there among the shadows.

In a window on Main street four nude mannequins, one missing a leg, looked out of place in the wintry scene, snow still piled high outside, although melting quickly. The mannequins seemed puzzled, much like everyone else this week, as March turned into January; their nudity perhaps due to haste in changing from winter to spring and back again. Or maybe they had become lost on the way to the nude beach up-Island.

Inside another store a woman pounded nails, arranging her own window scene of sweaters and shorts, a true shop for all seasons. Carpenters lingered outside other shops, tool belts banging against their hips as they made improvement plans with store owners. But it’s still too soon for the back beat of classic rock when seasonal preparations are in full swing.

Out in the harbor, the waves mimicked the mannequins baring themselves for all to see. That is nature’s way of course and as per usual nothing looked out of place at sea. Not the waves cresting, the birds soaring, nor the young woman looking silently into the distance her hands cupped together in prayer.

While watching a grammar school play a man feels an ache of sadness as he always does at these productions. He wonders why, but only for a moment because he knows the reason. Up there on the stage the children are all still young, but already some are beginning to wear the faces of the adults they will become.

Watching his own child age can be tough enough; seeing scores of them mature before his eyes feels a heavy weight. He finds, at this moment, that he is worried about every single one of them. How will they fare, out there without the armor of childhood at the ready?

The play continues. It concerns a quest with battles fought and lives lost. At the end the characters all return to smile and bow for the appreciative audience. The man cheers through his tears.

The Notebook was feeling grouchy, what with the snow and wind and cold, plus a host of other issues one wouldn’t think a disembodied email delivery service would have to contend with. Oddly enough, it was enjoying this cranky time, gnawing on it like a dog to a bone. Sometimes a deep wallow can feel so righteous and good.

But then it saw a sign on a classroom wall, held up with a few pieces of masking tape. The title read: How to Make People Happy. Below it were numerous suggestions, written in the colorful energy of the very young.

Thank your bus driver made a few mentions as did give Bob present, the lucky guy. Someone suggested giving someone a hug, but asking first, and another felt drawing 10 pictures and giving them to 10 people was the ticket. Start a compliment jar was such a hit that a compliment jar sat next to the poster.

The Notebook felt particularly drawn to the idea of drawing 15 hearts and giving them to 15 people, especially after it was given a heart and its foul mood was banished forever. Consider this note another one of those hearts passed along to you.

The Notebook was feeling at a loss so it went back to the beginning, to the graveyard where stories are told in the cold or warmth, the day or night, by the tired or the restless. It is a different type of storytelling out there, one that uses no words or sounds. True feeling rises to the top when talk has been silenced, on any day of the week, under cloudy or blue skies.

It wasn’t the first time this weekend that silence echoed so much louder than words have ever done. The Notebook stayed still, determined to let this rising roar lead the way.

A young woman new to living on the Island was enjoying its many charms, from seeing the sights to meeting the people, from bowling nights to learning to take care of a neighbor’s chickens. It all seemed like paradise, even before the weather turned warm enough to swim.

Then one day in early Spring while walking about her home she spotted a small black bean on her carpet. Odd, she thought, how did a black bean get all the way upstairs? As she walked closer to investigate, the small black bean began to walk away. She screamed and the small black bean turned and walked toward her. She screamed louder as one of the Vineyard’s main villains welcomed her to the Island.

Ticks, unlike vampires, do not need an invitation to come indoors. At last check, holy water does not work either.

A Gazette subscriber checked in at the start of winter asking for extra copies of old newspapers to help start fires in his wood stove. He received a pile of the Dec. 1 edition and placed the stack on his kitchen floor near the stove.

Although in most corners of the world time continued to march onward, in this particular kitchen events were anchored to one moment. The Oak Bluffs Christmas tree continued to be lit each day, and Noelle Lambert, the young woman who lost her leg in a moped accident, repeatedly returned to the Island to thank the first responders for saving her life. And day after day, the man’s friend Juan Laso, a bull fighter born in Spain who made his home here, peered out from his obituary to watch the comings and goings from his perch on floor.

This weekend Dec. 1 ended in this small kitchen corner of the world, the stack of papers finally depleted. A new pile of newspapers filled the space, this one dated March 30, with a cover photo of the SeaStreak riding to the rescue on Easter Weekend. One wonders if this moment will live on only in this particular kitchen, or will it by necessity continue all summer long for others too. Only time will tell.

Fifty years ago, on April 4, 1968, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis. On that night he gave his final speech at the Bishop Charles Mason Temple in Memphis, Tenn. He had traveled to Memphis in support of the sanitation workers there, 1,300 of whom were on strike. The speech was entitled I’ve Been to the Mountaintop. What follows is a small part of the speech, but The Notebook urges all to read it in its entirety.

You know, several years ago, I was in New York City autographing the first book that I had written. And while sitting there autographing books, a demented black woman came up. The only question I heard from her was, “Are you Martin Luther King?” And I was looking down writing, and I said yes. And the next minute I felt something beating on my chest. Before I knew it I had been stabbed by this demented woman. I was rushed to Harlem Hospital. It was a dark Saturday afternoon. And that blade had gone through, and the X-rays revealed that the tip of the blade was on the edge of my aorta, the main artery. And once that’s punctured, you drown in your own blood — that’s the end of you.

It came out in the New York Times the next morning, that if I had sneezed, I would have died. Well, about four days later, they allowed me, after the operation, after my chest had been opened, and the blade had been taken out, to move around in the wheel chair in the hospital. They allowed me to read some of the mail that came in, and from all over the states, and the world, kind letters came in. I read a few, but one of them I will never forget. I had received one from the President and the Vice-President. I’ve forgotten what those telegrams said. I’d received a visit and a letter from the Governor of New York, but I’ve forgotten what the letter said.

But there was another letter that came from a little girl, a young girl who was a student at the White Plains High School. And I looked at that letter, and I’ll never forget it. It said simply, “Dear Dr. King: I am a ninth-grade student at the Whites Plains High School.” She said, “While it should not matter, I would like to mention that I am a white girl. I read in the paper of your misfortune, and of your suffering. And I read that if you had sneezed, you would have died. And I’m simply writing you to say that I’m so happy that you didn’t sneeze.”

And I want to say tonight, I want to say that I am happy that I didn’t sneeze. Because if I had sneezed, I wouldn’t have been around here in 1960, when students all over the South started sitting-in at lunch counters. And I knew that as they were sitting in, they were really standing up for the best in the American dream. And taking the whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the Founding Fathers in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. If I had sneezed, I wouldn’t have been around in 1962, when Negroes in Albany, Georgia, decided to straighten their backs up. And whenever men and women straighten their backs up, they are going somewhere, because a man can’t ride your back unless it is bent.

If I had sneezed, I wouldn’t have been here in 1963, when the black people of Birmingham, Alabama, aroused the conscience of this nation, and brought into being the Civil Rights Bill. If I had sneezed, I wouldn’t have had a chance later that year, in August, to try to tell America about a dream that I had had. If I had sneezed, I wouldn’t have been down in Selma, Alabama, to see the great movement there. If I had sneezed, I wouldn’t have been in Memphis to see a community rally around those brothers and sisters who are suffering. I’m so happy that I didn’t sneeze.

It is often a surprise to discover which bits of information, amid the flow of news that passes unremarked through the Vineyard Gazette website, seem to hit a snag in the public imagination like some errant leaf in a swiftly moving stream.

This week a commenter, identifying him or herself only by the initials JT, suggested people over the age of 60 should undergo annual driving tests. This in response to the story of a 71-year-old man who accidentally drove into the Edgartown Meat and Fish store over the weekend.

“This happens far too often,” said JT, unleashing a flurry of reactions, some claiming ageism.

Though only four years old itself, the Notebook can recall only one similar incident, when a driver ran into another seafood emporium, the Net Result in Vineyard Haven. By strange coincidence, that accident also occurred in early April four years ago, but the driver in that case was just 25.

One observation arrived in email from a reader who thought the commenters missed the point.

“I wasn’t thinking about tests for us oldsters,” she said, “but rather how it’s dangerous to run a fish store.”

A friend of the Notebook recently wrote a piece in the Gazette about his high school hero, a man named Jeff Hoffman, who for a time ruled the wrestling mats and who in his outsized masculinity was everything the young writer wanted to be. The essay was written to honor Jeff, who also carried with him a cocoon of tenderness. Their interaction was brief, just one year and then they never saw each other again.

The metaphor that propelled the piece was about not knowing how one’s influence can be carried forward through the decades. Nearly 40 years later, real life had its say.

Yesterday, the writer heard that the story had been read by Jeff and read gratefully. But it was not Jeff who responded. Rather, it was his wife saying that Jeff had died that day, after a 10-month battle with cancer. One of the last things he read was the story, she said, and it meant so much to him, to her and to their son.

The storyteller never knows what the impact of his or her words will be, only that there is no other choice but to lay them down, one after another, hopefully following the trail of truth.

The Notebook sends condolences to Jeff’s family, holding forever the image of a young man standing tall and strong on the wrestling mat.

Found in the woods on the weekend: a tiny mayflower, buried beneath a pile of leaf litter and dead branches at the edge of a rushing stream. The weather was cold, gray and windy, much as it has been all this long spring. But there was the mayflower, trailing arbutus, state flower of Massachusetts, harbinger of spring and brave symbol of the changing season. Alone in its woodsy spot while the stream bubbled and gurgled around it.

That and the endless rain called to mind the Irish poet Michael Longley and his poem The Waterfall:

If you were to read my poems, all of them, I mean,
My life’s work, at the one sitting, in the one place,
Let it be here by this half-hearted waterfall
That allows each pebbly basin its separate say,
Damp stones and syllables, then, as it grows dark
And you go home past overgrown vineyards and
Chestnut trees, suppliers once of crossbeams, moon-
Shaped nuts, flour, and crackly stuffing for mattresses,
Leave them here, on the page, in your mind’s eye, lit
Like the fireflies at the waterfall, a wall of stars.

Manchester By the Sea, the place not the movie, sits about 30 miles outside of Boston, on the North Shore. It is a cozy town on the edge of the Atlantic, covering about eight square miles. Its population hovers just below 6,000 residents.

Five of those residents subscribe to the Vineyard Gazette.

Recently, in a fluke of the town’s postal service, instead of one copy of the Gazette going to each of these five subscribers, five copies of the Gazette were given to one of the subscribers. The mailing labels of his fellow subscribers in town were still intact, but he knew none of them, something still possible in small towns off-Island, evidently.

He thought for a moment, pondering taking the newspapers back to the post office and having them deal with the mistake. Instead he decided to take matters into his own hands. He checked the phone book and contacted each of his fellow subscribers and invited them over to pick up their papers, all at the same time. Everyone showed, resulting in a Gazette gathering party that was by all accounts a great success. The news of the Island was discussed, as were plans to get together more often, both on and off the Island.

A friend who is a frequent hiker on up-Island trails carries clippers with her on her walks and snips stray branches and clears debris from the paths as she goes. A man we know sometimes wanders the streets of Oak Bluffs filling a municipal orange plastic bag with nip bottles and plastic litter that have been cast out of cars. An elderly couple we often observed would park at the triangle in Edgartown and set out each day to Bend in the Road Beach, collecting roadside trash as they went.

Here’s to Earth Day – Sunday, April 22 -- and the people who care for the earth every day.

He had been thinking about the nature of the soul, something that did not occur to him enough he thought. So often he felt as if somewhere along the way he had been ghosted by his true self.

But on this day he felt it, while watching two little boys, not far past toddlerhood, dance any Monday morning blues away. They entered the newsroom handing out high fives, fist bumps and displaying their fancy footwork.

The little boys, twin tons of fun if you will, did not stay long but the feelings they created he wanted to bottle up and hold to his heart, as clearly as the image of them waving goodbye and promising to “see you yater.”

When you’re young, a half day at school due to parent/teacher conferences means the afternoon stretches before you, an entire empty plate ready to be filled. Three thirteen-year-old boys walked along State Beach wondering what to do next. They had meandered through town, feasted on tacos and were looking for their next adventure.

The boys reached the Jaws jumping bridge and stopped for a moment. It was empty of course. Overhead the skies were gray and a light rain tumbled down. But it was a warmish rain, for late April that is.

One boy made a suggestion, it was seconded and then confirmed by the third. They stripped down to their underwear, climbed up on the railing and then sailed off into the sky as one. That felt good. Landing in 50-degree water was another story. They warmed up with chowder and pizza, and the joy of being young on a quiet spring day as April turns to May and grammar school soon becomes high school.

A man hits tennis balls against a backboard, taking a break from work and looking for inspiration. The exercise feels good as does the sound of the ball rhythmically hitting the wall. But it’s not enough.

Then he hears another sound, the laughing of young children in a park nearby. He glances over, sees a few mothers and their toddlers, and remembers when his world revolved around jungle gyms, slides and sandboxes.

He looks about, at a hawk soaring far above, a flag rippling, dandelions painting yellow faces on a carpet of green. In the near distance there is a graveyard where a family of bunnies nibble at some clover.

He turns back to the small children who are doing what all kids do if given the chance: smiling and shrieking with delight as they build civilizations in the sandbox and become super heroes as they leap about. And not for a moment do they notice the passing of so much time.

A gull hovers above the parking lot at Memorial Wharf, beating its wings in time with the wind. A large conchshell protrudes from its beak so that the bird looks like an avian jazz player about to play a trumpet.

The gull drops the shell onto the pavement and descends to have a meal. It stares at the shell, now broken into three pieces, finds nothing to eat and begins to swear like a sailor — in gull language of course but easily understood. It picks up the largest piece, flies into the air and drops it again on the pavement. Still nothing.

The gull waddles away and stands with its back to the mosaic of shells, feathers ruffled but saying nothing.

A man and a woman walk by, holding hands. “Takes after me,” the man says, and then, after running a few steps, lifts off and flies away into the distance, his bushy mustache waving in the wind. The gull and the woman watch him disappear, marveling at the way life improvises if you let it.

Standing out in a field, on a farm that seems to stretch all the way to the horizon line, a lone woman waters some new seedlings. She is dressed in black, holding a red hose, her other hand resting on her hip. Her hair is blonde, her back turned and she leans forward just slightly. Behind her, acres of crops are poised to make an entrance, after a few more weeks of sun and rain and tending to.

The woman turns. She is pregnant. Very pregnant. About as pregnant as the fields she cares for. It is as if Mother Nature has taken solid form to say yes, this is how it is done, seed by seed, child by child — with a touch of style too.

Happy Mother’s Day, in all its forms.

As a young boy he liked to walk in the rain, splashing puddles contentedly and feeling at ease with his place in the world. For some reason the rain helped.

Years later, when feeling anything but at ease with himself he would try to remember that little boy. But the image always felt cloudy, as if half erased or lived by someone else.

But today, when he closed his eyes to take stock of who he was, he could see the little boy again, standing right in front of him, wearing a big smile. Welcome back, his younger self said. Welcome back.

The rain falls in drips and heavy drops, waxing and waning as it hovers above the Island for days on end. It falls on beaches and sidewalks, bends leaves beneath its drumbeat, and echoes across rooftops.

Beneath one roof, a little girl catches a cold, her hot brow furrowed with worry as her dance recital is just a few days away. This year she is to dance as a candy heart. From her bed she looks with sadness at her new white tutu encircled with a bright red stripe, a lonely sight beckoning from the doorknob.

Downstairs, a teenage boy creates his yearbook page, his eighth grade graduation waving from a few weeks down the road. He chooses a toddler picture of himself, standing with bare chest and bare everything else too, his fingers laced behind his head. He is the picture of ease and contentment with hoards of Legos within reach. He strategically creates a blur to keep the image PG and hopes it passes muster with the censors.

A father wandering through the house tries to find where all the years have gone. He looks under the bed, in the way back of the refrigerator, and beneath the couch cushions. Then he walks out onto the porch where his tears fall, in drips and heavy drops, waxing and waning for days on end.

The sun finally arrived on Monday and all around the Island feet were unsheathed from the confines of shoes and sneakers in favor of going bare. Shorts were rediscovered along with bathing suits — Inkwell beach scored in the double digits for bathers on Monday afternoon.

The weather was a warm welcome as Memorial Day weekend approaches, but the Boys in Blue around the Island did Mother Nature one better. A distracted tourist was driving around Vineyard Haven, having no clue how to get to her rental home in Chilmark. A Tisbury officer said follow me and escorted her to the town line, where a West Tisbury officer picked up the good deed, escorting her to the next town line where a Chilmark officer welcomed her and completed the journey.

The season approaches. Soon the sun will shine, the air will smell of barbecues and traffic will roll very slowly through town. And through it all tourists will lose their way. Please do your part to keep them off the streets.

No one knows when the stink bug arrived, staking out a bit of turf in the newsroom next to a small cluster of potted plants. One day, in the late fall, it was just there, moving slowly from leaf to leaf or spending time on a shelf next to a workstation. It didn’t smell, the name only coming into play when squashed, nor did it bite or scratch or make loud and annoying noises. Instead, in its solitary, quiet way, it nestled into the heart of a grizzled journalism veteran.

He named the bug Steadman, after a great uncle he never met, but who appeared in pictures quiet and steady, with long arms and skin the color of tree bark.

The winter months passed into early spring and Steadman seemed pleased with his home and his new friend. On deadline he retreated deep within the plants, knowing when to stay out of the fray. On calmer days he walked to the edge of the shelf, just a short hop from the computer, looking ready to jump in as needed.

Sometimes, when he thought no one was looking, the man talked to the bug, sharing parts of his life he never told anyone else.

Yesterday, when the man walked into work, a latte in his hand, he saw Steadman lying on his back, his long legs reaching upward. There was no movement. He wondered if there had been foul play. Then he checked the internet and read that a stinkbug’s life span is only about six months.

He turned Steadman over, placed him next to his computer, just a few inches from his keyboard and tried to go on about his day as if nothing had changed.

It is nearing June and while coaching batting practice he listens to his 14-year-old players talk about their proposed summer jobs, the list of possibilities, interviews and how many hours they will work, this first summer of their official working lives. Thinking back to his first summer job, he is envious of them. He takes a peak in the rearview mirror and sees himself, way behind on the dishwashing line as a crush of Saturday night dishes descends, tray after tray after tray.

There were four of them on the line, high school kids from different states, coming together as one sweaty unit here on the Vineyard. During the long nights they fueled up on leftovers and half-finished glasses of wine, plucked from the trays. He fell in love with a twenty-something waitress who treated him like a kid brother, patting him on the head as she punched out her time card. Because they couldn’t drive yet, he and his fellow dishwashers biked home in the deep dark, stopping for a dip in the ocean in place of a shower.

In the morning they all woke early to gather hay bales at one of the farms and toss them into the slow moving cart that ambled in front of them. The hay stuck to their bodies, dry and itchy, the twine dug into their hands. The tower of bales grew taller and taller until it felt impossible to heave up one more, and then they drove to the barn to unload.

In the afternoons they slept, on beaches, porches, wherever it felt cool.

Back in the present, still throwing batting practice, he no longer sees the faces of his young players. Instead, he sees the boy he once was, along with his fellow dishwashers whom he never saw again but always, at this time of year, remembers with a clarity that astonishes him.

The leaves appeared as if by magic this week and the pollen fell like rain. Empty porches came alive with conversations, and a returning barista hugged her favorite coffee shop customer.

In the sky, a gathering of white clouds turned a hint of red as the sun set, causing one young girl to comment that it was like looking up and seeing the inside of a baseball. She reached up and placed her fingers on the red marks and threw a perfect curveball. Perhaps you noticed the shift in the gravitational pull.

Fireflies have yet to emerge, but on Wednesday a pair of snapping turtles sat at the side of a pond, debating whether this was the year they should go rogue and bite a swimmer’s toe.

A brown pelican made a visit to the Island and a crew of chickens devoured some fresh young tomato plants. A small fence was built but they just laughed, jumped over it and nibbled some more. A half-tame wild rabbit watched all the fuss, wiggling its ears while nibbling some fresh clover.

Welcome June. What kept you?

In perhaps another life, or at least that is the way it feels, he remembers his son being born, the actual moment and the ones immediately afterwards, when still in the hospital and surrounded by midwives, nurses and doctors, all ready to lend a hand. The bigger moment occurred when they walked out the door of the hospital, the couple now three, but completely clueless, with family far away and no real manual to turn to. The car seat felt so heavy and clumsy.

They didn’t know their baby wasn’t eating, the breast milk not reaching him for days, and thought crying just came with the territory. When he grew silent they were happy, but in retrospect he wonders if their baby had given up on them. Eventually, they sorted out the feeding but he often thinks back to those first few days, frightened of how dangerously incapable they were.

On Saturday, he stands on the dock watching the ferry boat leave, his now teenage son in there somewhere with his schoolmates, headed off for an extended journey, the longest by far they have ever been apart. He isn’t nervous or sad as he waves goodbye to his son, and yet he can't get the image out of his mind of the baby he was, one fist raised in the air as he desperately tried to tell his parents how much he needed them. And as he watches the ferry pull away he wishes, as he often does, that he told his son how much he also needs him.

He tries to remember walking across his high school graduation stage but has no recollection of it. He can’t feel the handshake and transfer of diploma from the principal or throwing his cap in the air. But he does remember with perfect clarity that is was a sunny day with just a few clouds hovering in the distance, omens to what he is still not sure.

He remembers those seated next to him, alphabetical acquaintances through the years, sharing lockers and now this moment, but little else. He can’t remember what his parents said to him, but he can see their faces engraved in that moment, younger than he is now, looking both pleased and nervous. After all, he would be leaving home soon.

He remembers his four grandparents, still alive and patting him on the back. He remembers their touch, one grandfather’s bow tie, the other’s brown suit, and both his grandmothers kissing him on the cheek. At his desk now he reaches up to touch the spot, but the memory shifts to his classmates, his town and the highway that bordered the school. He remembers cars beeping as they drove by on that sunny day. Oddly enough, he remembers that most of all.

Happy graduation, class of 2018. May you remember every moment, big and small.

He visits but once a year, dancing into their lives from both the past and the present. Long ago they became friends while trying to learn to live as adults, but still so far from the mark. There have been gaps over time, but not lately, these annual visits blending into the calendar of their lives.

When he leaves they feel confused as if they had forgotten something. They spend hours looking under pillows, behind couches, pondering the borders of the backyard. Eventually, they remember what it was they were looking for and grow silent. The wind rustles, a crow calls and a chipmunk chatters. It is enough, this music of the backyard. They stretch their arms and leap into each other’s embrace, moving to the beat of his wide open heart.

In a room without a number, and a high school without a name, a group of students sit in a circle sharing their personal essays. Each desk is a next-door neighbor, the class and a guest teacher listening silently as the words are read out loud. A few students ask that their work be kept secret, no spreading it to the wider world.

The room becomes a safe space and he listens intently to these full-length drafts, scraps of which were created when he visited a few weeks earlier.

How do they do it, he wonders. How do they know what to say and how to say it at such a young age. He remembers running from feeling, preferring numbness to exploration for far too long. Writing changed everything for him, and now here he is overcome with emotion as he listens to a student’s words that he played a small part coaxing into life.

He wants to tell them this and so much more and to also thank them for being so brave and so strong. But then the bell rings and there is no time for these words amidst the clearing of desks and putting away of notebooks, paper and pens.

He watches the students walk out the door into the crowded high school hallway, their stories quietly following them from a short distance away.

One night, a father and his young daughter met a collector of sounds. The stars were quiet but not much else as a wedding party danced into the night. The collector of sounds whistled slowly, adding a low vibration to the note, which for a moment made all the other sounds disappear into the dark.

After whistling, he held the silence in the palm of his hands then clapped them together, gathering up the air like a magician to form an echo. The young girl and her father watched the sound rise to the top of the tent and then float back down on a parachute.

They went for a walk then, the father, the daughter and the collector of sounds, adding cricket violins to the mix, the ocean waves drumming against the sand, and even the stars, which were now whispering in full sentences about the passing of time. They stood at the edge of a bonfire, listening to the wood crackle and the people smiling as they talked about love and new adventures. And then they watched, the father and the young daughter, as the collector of sounds smiled and floated away.

Because the news of the day and the world of adults was just too painful this week, the Notebook put on its Spider Man costume and went back to kindergarten. High school graduation was two weeks ago, but for the younger grades school ends today.

The Notebook spent the week happily sitting in circle time, trying not to nudge its neighbors; a little girl wearing a yellow hard hat and red suspenders, and a little boy dressed as a princess.

The class played a lot of duck, duck, goose, and created cut out pictures of their families and pets. The Notebook was asked to stop eating the paste, but old habits are hard to kick.

They sang songs for kindergartners with birthdays in July and August, and wherever they walked they held hands, smiling and waving to everyone and everything.

The Notebook did not want the week to end and for a time hid in its kindergarten cubbie, nestled next to a little girl’s collection of garden snails brought in for share-time. Eventually, the Notebook was discovered by the teacher, who patted its head and suggested that it was time to return to the world of adults and remind everyone that a stranger is just friend you haven’t met yet, that everyone deserves a hug, and the thing children fear most of all is being separated from their parents.

While his wife lay in a hospital bed receiving her chemotherapy treatment he took a break from holding her hand and wandered the streets of Boston. It was cold, a fierce wind attacking from around every block, and he took refuge in a small bookstore.

Browsing, he found a book by Donald Hall, two actually, one of poetry another of prose, both about the death of his wife Jane Kenyon from Leukemia. Mr. Hall did not flinch and yet it wasn’t only despair he preached on the page. It was love and devotion and the nature of writing, the act of putting words onto the page every day, assembling their order and sound from out of nothing, that sang the loudest.

He purchased both and kept them hidden under the bed at home, feeling guilty about his need for Mr. Hall to accompany him on his own journey. After all, the books marched toward death, and he had been taught to only look on the bright side. He hadn’t lost hope, no that would never happen. Rather, for the first time in his life he had decided to feel every moment, no matter how hard it hurt. Donald Hall helped him see that through.

Mr. Hall, a former poet laureate of the U.S., and author of more than 40 books died on Saturday at the age of 89. Upon hearing the news, the man went to his bookshelf, retrieved those books, and brought them to bed that night. His wife lay by his side. Years ago, when she had finished her treatments he had told her about Mr. Hall and why he kept turning to him that year. He reached over and held her hand as he read to her one of the poems.

Eventually, they turned off the lights and said good night. But he didn’t go to sleep, preferring to lie there and listen to the rise and fall of his breathing, the rain falling on the roof, and the sound of his wife’s heart beating beautifully beside him.

Do you know the term Rooster Dropping? The Notebook recently encountered it when a query from a young reader came in. Dear Notebook, the young girl began.

I need help. I have raised five chickens and they live outside in a nice big coop. I also have a big brother, a mother and a father, and usually they are very nice people. But not anymore.

Two days ago a rooster showed up in the yard. I don’t know from where. He puffed out his chest and did a lot of crowing. One night Mr. Rooster crowed all night long, right outside the coop. I think he really likes my hens, especially Maya Rose. She is broody right now. That means she sits in her laying box all day guarding her eggs, thinking they might hatch. Then my dad takes her eggs and it sounds like she is crying while he eats them for breakfast.

Mr. Rooster moved into the laying box yesterday. He seems very happy there and so does Maya Rose. But he still crows all night, beginning at 3 a.m. At least that is what my family tells me in the morning. I don’t hear it because I am a very good sleeper. Now my brother wants to shoot it with his bow and arrow, and he has really good aim. My mother and father want animal control to come get it. Animal control is a man who says it sounds like a case of rooster dropping, when a family who doesn’t want a rooster drops it off in the woods where they don’t live. I have decided I don’t like people who rooster drop.

I say Mr. Rooster is just doing what a rooster does and so he should be left alone, and maybe even Maya Rose will have baby chicks if he gets to stay. What do you think, Mr. Notebook?

The Notebook usually refrains from getting involved with family disputes, but in this case it was moved to do so. Dear young reader, tell your father if he doesn’t let the rooster stay you will begin an espresso cleanse, get a tattoo of a great white shark on your back, start calling yourself Uncle Pete who don’t take sheet, and wake up at 3 a.m. every night crying for your lost rooster. That should do the trick.

To beat the heat of summer a man gives himself a crew cut in the backyard. Afterwards he collects his hair, rolls it into a ball and puts it beneath the deck, where a nice rabbit lives with its new babies. It will make perfect nesting material, he thinks.

He rubs his head, feeling the coolness, especially around the ears. He bikes to the beach, jumps in the water and relishes this hairless journey beneath the surface of the waves.

Later, back at home, his children return from a playdate. He smiles and waves at them but they look at him in horror. “You look like an advertisement for a guy going bald,” his son yells at him before stomping off to the backyard. His daughter begins to cry. “You look terrible,” she says between sniffles. “Like some scary guy I saw in a movie you let me watch but mom said you shouldn’t.”

The man stands alone in the front yard, suddenly not so sure about the free summer haircut he gave himself. In the distance a wind builds in the trees, whispering that the Fourth of July is once again here, celebrating freedom in all its forms. Except for thrifty fathers looking for a bit of summer relief, that is.

There was a sherbet sunset over Oak Bluffs Tuesday, warm yellows and melon orange. It was the kind of timeless summer evening that smells like childhood, sunscreen and sun-baked wooden porches, ice cream cones and barbecue smoke. It was the day before Fourth of July. Summer hung on the vine like a newly-ripe strawberry.

A line snaked around the parking lot at Back Door Donuts as those waiting debated how many apple fritters to take home. A brother and sister practiced a secret handshake. Children crowded the swing set at Niantic Park as teenagers walked in a group toward Circuit avenue. Down the street music by the Island Community Chorus wafted out the open doors of Union Chapel.

The melody hung in the air long after the sun had set and Jupiter appeared to the west, bringing to mind the lyrics of Stephen Foster: “Beautiful dreamer, wake unto me, starlight and dewdrops are waiting for thee; sounds of the rude world, heard in the day, lull’d by the moonlight have all passed away.”

While passing the time with a breeze beneath the shade of a robust maple tree the Notebook noticed a man with a weed-whacker tending a cemetery plot. It reminded the Notebook of a boy it once knew who worked one summer at a local graveyard, cleaning headstones and mowing the grass along the quiet avenues.

One afternoon the boy fell asleep while on break. The sun was high and hot, and he had been up late enjoying the starry skies of his teenage years. When he woke up and sat up, he surprised a woman paying her respects a few headstones away. Thinking a ghost had risen, she gasped and held her hand to her heart.

The boy quickly assured her that he was very much alive, just tired, and he hoped she didn’t turn him in to his boss. The woman smiled and began laughing. “Thank you,” she said. “That was the first laugh I have had in a very long time.”

The boy never forgot that moment and the woman’s smile. He often thinks of it when he is sad, he told the Notebook, because it makes him feel better, especially when passing the time with a breeze beneath the shade of a robust maple tree.

For the first time in his life as a parent he went to sleep before his son returned home. He was tired and it was on the early side and no curfew broken, but still it felt momentous.

In the morning he opened his son’s bedroom door and noticed how he no longer kicked his bed covers off in the night, and how his body stretched the entire length of the bed. He closed the door gently, walked downstairs to the kitchen where he ate breakfast alone, his daughter also still asleep.

Later in the day, as the sun climbed higher in the sky, he began to notice small children everywhere, in strollers and snuggies, holding hands with their parents, riding Big Wheels and trainer tricycles, nibbling Cheerios from small snackpacks, toddling and napping, climbing trees, chasing unicorns, playing with toy trains and Lego’s and hide and seek. They followed him everywhere he went, it seemed, reminding him of a time he had almost forgotten, but that now seemed mere moments ago.

It was low tide early in the morning on Fuller street beach. A man walked and walked and walked trying to find some depth in which to cool off. It never arrived. Hundreds of yards out, the water was still only calf high.

He sat down and turned toward shore, feeling as if he were resting in a giant outdoor bathtub. Two gulls dropped shells on the rocks trying to crack open some breakfast. A woman walked her small dog along the wrack line, urging it forward with pleas of, here honey, here honey. To the left, Chappy lay behind a mist as if not properly dressed yet for the day.

While sitting in the water, the man pondered the nature of friendships, in particular reunions after many years apart. He lingered on that warm feeling until the tide rolled in allowing him to swim backwards and forwards in time, from the first meeting to last night and beyond. He is still out there, that man, ebbing and flowing not far from shore feeling perfectly content to pass the time this way.

She walks fast and smiles easily. She is competitive, whether chasing stories or guessing the water temperature. She is a friend to all but perhaps especially to wildlife, a writer of warmth and depth about right whales, sharks, owls, cats, oysters and extinct heath hens. She is also leaving, after six and half years at the Gazette.

Today is Sara Brown’s last day. Her car is packed, the West Coast calls and new adventures await. If the newsroom could lower its quill-shaped weathervane to half mast it would.

Many know her by her byline, her presence at town meetings or her voice on the radio. Here in the newsroom we know her on a daily basis, and as an integral part of our lives. And so today feels more than slightly askew as Sara files her last story, packs up her bags and turns off her computer, not for the night but for the last time.

We are caught averting our gaze, trying so hard not to follow the story in front of us. This is not what we were trained to do, but it feels so much better this way.

She turns and waves, just one more time, before walking out the door. We all call out — See you soon Sara Brown, see you soon. Foolishly believing our words, we feel better, but only for a short while.

Three generations of women — a daughter, a mother and grandmother — walk together on the sidewalk. The daughter, about 12 years old or so, runs ahead.

She has FOMO, the mother says. What’s that? asks the grandmother. It’s Fear of Missing Out.

A beat, then the grandmother says, I have FOBMA, Fear of Being Missed Altogether. You know, like at the dinner table when no one talks to the older folks.

Another beat, then the mother says, I have FOBI, Fear of Being Included. You know, like when you just want to run away and hide but no one lets you.

Just then the young girl returns, grabs her grandmother’s hand and says, I need you to see this right now. As the pair walks away, quickly moving down the sidewalk, the mother smiles, slows her pace and breathes deeply into this small miracle that happened when no one, save one bystander, was looking.

They sat together, two old friends, sharing small bits of their journeys after not seeing each other for a long time. Had they actually been friends, he wondered, or just acquaintances? The passage of time seemed to both compress and distort, so that decades apart had brought them closer.

It was a good feeling, this closeness, but also one that took him by surprise. Perhaps it had to do with when they met, a time of youthful discovery. More likely it was the conversation, briskly leading to many topics over egg sandwiches and coffee, but returning again and again to what mattered most.

Later, he sat staring at the clouds while they swam quickly across the sky. It began to rain then, softly but steadily, much like his life felt at that moment.

As the busy season becomes busier he finds himself remembering what a wise old nun once told him about a practice she called telephone stopping. Every time the phone rang she paused and took three breaths before answering. It was like a relaxation alarm clock, she said.

She also led him on the most epic walk he had ever taken, just a few city blocks in length but lasting hours. There were 30 people on that walk, 29 social justice nuns and him, walking heel-to-toe in a meditative conga line of sorts on the streets of New York city.

He tried a shortened version of it today, after discovering telephone stopping was not really conducive to his job. It did feel good, the world coming to a crawl for a few moments. But what felt even better was the memory of walking with the sisters, one step at a time on a journey he could never have imagined taking.

Back in the office the phone rings. He stops, breathes in three times and imagines it is Sister Carol calling to say hello one more time. And of course it is her, at least that is what he tells himself when he decides not to answer it for fear of discovering some other truth.

Each summer, for the first Friday of August, the Gazette creates an annual changeover paper that goes into every mailbox on the Island. It is a hefty undertaking, but the scene at night in the press room is timeless, as nearly 120 miles of paper are printed, sorted and folded.

While revelers from Main street return to their homes from bars and ice cream parlors or late night walks, the press room on Davis Lane continues to hum. The garage doors are open to let in fresh air and the lights from inside glow brightly. People stop and watch like moths drawn to a back porch lamp.

Indoors, the hum of the sorting machines mixes with the chatter of nearly the entire office, from summer interns to long time reporters and editors, sometimes with their grown children helping too. They stand shoulder to shoulder rather than sit desk to desk as they do each day. Their faces, arms and legs carry streaks of black ink like badges of armor.

While reading the Gazette today, in print or online, think of this scene. We hope it makes you smile as much as we did while creating it.

In the off-season there are no tickets for parking on the streets of Edgartown. That changes in the summer and many at the Gazette choose to park on the other side of town, in a ticket-free zone. But parking is not the focus of this morning. It is a graveyard that concerns the Notebook.

To walk from the lot to the newsroom, one travels by foot through the Edgartown cemetery. This brings up a question: how is one’s workday different when it starts and ends with a stroll over sacred ground. Two men walking home one evening to their cars provided one perspective.

“In the morning, looking at the headstones, I feel grounded by history,” one man said. “But then at night, when walking home, I look at the same headstones and think, drat, another day closer to living here.”

The broody chicken is finally off the nest, her raconteur rooster long gone with no tomorrow. The other hens greet her warmly back into the mix, sharing a snack of mealworms and feed. The half tame/half wide rabbit lounges in the dry grass of the backyard wishing for rain but getting none. A snack of carrots soothes her pain.

The tomatoes are fat and ripe and perfect when sliced thick and sprinkled with a pinch of salt. Further afield, out on the roads, two men yell obscenities at each other; one is driving too fast, the other too slowly. But out on the beach sanity is salvaged with the timeless treasure of watching a toddler discover sand and surf for the first time.

It would seem all is as it should be as summer digs deeper into August. Mostly this is true. But out on Ice House Pond, recently closed due to high bacteria, two snapping turtle sigh with pangs of loneliness. Or is it hunger? After all, August toes are known to be so much more tender.

At a certain job with a lot of customer contact, a group of 14 year olds, new to the tradition of working, keep a running list of celebrities who stop by to have a snack or ice cream. There are several bold faced names on the list, those with familiar faces to the kids.

Recently, a man stopped by who no one recognized at first. Then one worker emerged from the backroom to load a few orders of French fries into bags. He looked out the customer window. “Hey, I don’t know who you are but I recognize you from somewhere” he said to the customer.

The customer smiled and gave his name, and to the paper filled with A-list actors and a late night television host, a neurosurgeon and medical correspondent was added: Sanjay Gupta, his name now posted along with the other celebrities just a few inches above the fryer, behind a ketchup bottle and a half finished chocolate frappe, the page already turning a slight yellow as the grease and sweat of another August day has its final say over everyone.

While sitting at the docks, watching a woman quietly feed four eager ducks, he heard a whisper. It started out small but began to build. He turned but saw no one and went back to staring at the water as a school of minnows created ripples on the surface.

But the whisper continued, louder now and more insistent. He turned again, saw a parade of ants marching royally down a brick pathway, two pairs of twins holding hands and eating peppermint stick ice cream cones, a dog with one eye and cat with none. But nowhere could he see someone whispering to him.

He turned his attention back to the four ducks. One stood, one swam, one preened, but the fourth, standing off by himself, stared straight at him, moving its beak in a way that looked familiar. He turned to make sure no one was watching and then waved. The duck waved back, and at that point he knew exactly who was waving at him. “I’ve missed you,” he said. “So very much.”

While at the agricultural fair a man stands by himself while his daughter waits in line to ride the Zipper with her friends. He gazes out over the fairgounds, noticing how the older teenagers greet the much younger kids with such joy and vice versa, a sign of community that touches him deeply.

While looking around he also notices another man standing alone, and wonders if that man is thinking the same thoughts. Then the other man turns. He is wearing blue overalls and a baggy sweater and no one seems to notice that he is John Mellencamp.

The man thinks for a moment and then approaches Mellencamp. “I bet no one has ever told you this,” he says, “but you helped me win a lot of wrestling matches.”

Mellencamp looks wide-eyed. “How so?” he asks. “Your music,” the man says. “It helped psych us up back in high school.”

Mellencamp stands still for a beat, then bends his knees and gets in a stance, his hands up and ready: “Wanna wrestle?” he asks.

The man assumes a wrestling stance too, and for a brief moment it looks like another fair attraction is about to begin. Instead, both men smile, stand, and choose to fist bump instead. They part ways then, two dudes in a small town, one going to retrieve his daughter, dizzy now after her ride on the Zipper, the other stepping into the photo booth with his girlfriend for a memento of the day.

As a first year of high school approaches for his son, a father heads to the bookshelves. Summer is nearly over but a week of long summer days and nights remains. His plan is to pick the best writing he has in his shelves — the voices that shook him, held him, consoled him, traveled with him, but mostly inspired him — and force his son to read them.

It will be magical, he thinks to himself, a primer of spectacular proportions that his son will thank him for again and again and again. His pile of books grows larger and larger, nearly engulfing him: Bellow, Marquez, McCullers, Calvino, Oates, Diaz, Saunders, Boyle, Maxwell, Proulx, he simply can’t stop.

Periodically, he stops to read opening lines out loud as if possessed: I am American, Chicago born, Chicago that somber city; We were all dangerous characters then; Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice; For a long time, I went to bed early; A screaming comes across the sky.

For those wondering, the father is still there, in his basement lost in his old books, ranting and raving the words he loves while his son tiptoes out of the house each morning aided by his sister and mother and any guests still lingering in the house as the end of summer calls. And to these people the boy is ever grateful.

The half wild/half tame rabbit started visiting over a year ago. When friends stopped by, and the rabbit burst out of the large rhododendron bush running up to them like a small dog, some screamed fearing something vicious and rabid was about to pounce.

The little girl would laugh, pull the rabbit into her lap and scratch behind her ears.

The half wild/half tame rabbit came and went through the seasons, visiting many homes in the neighborhood. The little girl’s father said it was the best pet ever, trotting at his side as he inspected the backyard and then heading off to the woods while he walked inside, no cage or litter box to tend to.

Recently the half wild/half tame rabbit was attacked, the beast unknown but the scratches harsh; one on the nose, another at the eye and a deep one on the neck. The little girl left saucers of water by the deck as she lay on her belly looking underneath and offering encouraging words to her wounded friend. It seemed to be working and the scars healing. But then the neck wound deepened and now the rabbit has not been seen for several days.

The little girl still shimmies on her belly each morning and night to look for the half wild/half tame rabbit under the deck. The father lies down on his belly too, at night after the little girl has gone to bed, and feels an ache in his heart as he looks into the darkness.

Out past the perimeter of the yard the cicadas sing their song eternal as the full moon hovers in the sky. And from inside the coop the chickens cluck with restless nighttime worry as they too call out, “Where are you, our backyard buddy?”

While driving to work a man passes the high school. At first he thinks nothing of this, then feels a shiver in his bones. In a few days his oldest child will be a freshman.

He glances again at the school and sees ghosts. He watches so clearly as a buddy, the fighter in their mix, hurts a much weaker student for no reason. Decades later that friend, a doctor of gerontology now, visits and while talking says it was that moment when he chose to change course, a realization arriving that he needed to put his anger away.

Another friend floats up through the subconscious. This one the smartest of the crew but whose path led to a much darker future.

Then he sees the girl he fell in love with, walking those high school hallways, but who he had to admire from afar because he was too tongue-tied. And yet now she lies down beside him each night and before they close their eyes for sleep they marvel yet again at all the mistakes they make as parents.

A new school year beckons. Good luck students. Good luck teachers. Good luck parents and caregivers everywhere.

Contrary to calendar rules, the Notebook always considers Labor Day a time for resolutions rather than the traditional New Year’s Day reflections. Here on the Island, January is a mess of deep freezes and even deeper darkness. Resolving to survive the quiet gloom is more on the mind than mending any wayward ways.

Labor Day, on the other hand, is a perfect moment to pause. The free frolic of summer has eased and the mind finally finds some stillness. One’s introvert gets a hug, while one’s over-extended extrovert side is given a time out on the hammock. New beginnings float to the surface as effortlessly as jellyfish on a now forgotten August afternoon.

The trick of course with resolutions is to watch out for heavy traffic. Far better to look both ways, repeatedly, with a glance to the skies above too, before making any sudden movements or decisions.

Or, if you discover yourself standing at the side of the road, staring off into the distance at nothing at all and finding this quite fascinating in its own right, well then you may have found the most perfect resolution of all.

On Tuesday, summer intern Katherine Gianni collected her legal pads into a pile. It stretched upward, threatening to topple over like a giant Jenga tower. She had written a lot of stories and taken a lot of notes.

The newsroom during the summer is powered by its interns — along with increasingly larger amounts of coffee and salty snacks. Interns jump into the fray in late May, learning quickly that they are not just valued, they are essential. Readers see this on a weekly basis. What they don’t see is how quickly interns become family at the Gazette.

In the newsroom we like to say there are no goodbyes because the writing and stories live on. This is true but Katherine’s smile and grace under fire are rather addictive on a daily basis; there is no getting around that. To watch her clean her desk and close her computer on her last story this summer was hard to witness.

Noah Asimow will continue on as a full-time reporter so rather than being doubly sad, there is gentle hazing to be done with respect to Noah, something that makes us all feel better for a moment or two. Katherine was still in the newsroom heading toward the stairwell when one grizzled reporter began to feel the weight of the moment already.

“I miss Katherine,” he said. Indeed, we all do.

Last spring he finally visited the September 11 memorial at Ground Zero, something he had avoided for too long. He took his teenage son for whom this was just part of history, not something lived through from a few blocks away, and with friends who died that day. They walked through the exhibit, like visiting a cemetery where the ghosts are so much more real through video and photos.

He was amazed at how perfectly the exhibit brought back that day and the weeks afterward. The blue wall a mirror of the sky that morning, the photos of the missing pasted on fences, corner stones, store windows, and the images of ash drifting over lower Manhattan. The exhibit could not bring back the smell, but everything else was there and the memories flooded back.

That morning from his office uptown he finally reached a buddy by phone, who was standing outside downtown when the towers fell but with enough distance to escape by running for his life. His friend had been talking to his father when they lost their connection. “Can you call my dad, from your landline, and let him know I’m okay.”

He dialed the number and announced himself as he always did when talking to this man he had known for decades. The father started weeping uncontrollably, thinking his son’s friend had been chosen to break the bad news to him. “Your son’s okay, your son’s okay,” he yelled into the phone again and again and again until the crying finally stopped.

That was a long time ago, but while walking through the exhibit with his own son it felt like just a moment ago, as it does again this morning.

The chickens are penned in rather than roaming free after the neighbor called to say he had put down a layer of fall grass seed. It will be for only a week but already the hens call out from behind the fence, huddled together in an indignant stance demanding an explanation. There is no egg strike, not yet.

At the bank, the teller smiles and says her shift is nearly over for the day and so fishing will commence in a few minutes. She’s landed a few but no derby keepers, not yet.

In the early evening the man still crawls on his belly to look beneath the deck in hopes of seeing the half-wild/half-tame rabbit, but there is nothing but dirt and darkness under there. He thinks of giving up hope but decides not yet.

The next morning, he watches his teenage son prepare breakfast and for a moment sees an adult where a child once was. He lets out a sigh and his son turns and asks what is the matter. But he has no answer, not yet.

Two women sit on the beach chatting. The have just met but have mutual friends and events overlap. The weather is perfect, the water still warm and the conversation ebbs and flows easily.

Then one woman says, “I see you are part of the blue dot club.” 

The other woman pauses, not understanding at first what she means. Then she looks down at her chest at the blue dot there, a small tattoo that denotes a time spent receiving radiation treatment. She tells her story and in turn the other woman points to her blue dot and tells her story. They are both healthy now, smiling and laughing as they explore their shared history.

A man rises from the sand to go for a swim with his daughter. At the water’s edge he turns, marveling at the sight. The setting sun is at his back, cradling the two strong women in its glow. He looks left and right at the other people on the beach, all of them with their own hard stories to tell, but for the moment everyone appears protected by an enormous blanket of gold.

A recent lull in the newsroom prompted a discussion on learning how to drive a car. One reporter said his mother forced him to start on a stick shift, the better to keep his hands busy and away from texting.

Another said his father told him this car is a gun and that accelerator is the trigger.

Another said her mother would close her eyes while in the passenger seat, not out of fear but as a test to see if the young driver could change lanes without her detecting it, the true mark of smooth safety.

Another said he couldn’t remember his first lesson, it was too long ago, but he did recall an advanced driver training class. There was an unfinished highway nearby and a tricked out car for some reason at his high school’s disposal. The course had cones, a section slicked down with grease, and at the push of a button a tire would blow out. It was stunt driving for teens, led by an unusually tall and laconic shop teacher, who sat in the passenger seat breathing loudly through his prominent nose.

The class took place on the cusp of fall during his senior year, on a day just like today. The sun bounced off the macadam, a few brown leaves skittered roadside and behind the wheel he felt like Burt Reynolds. He had a crush on his classmate in the backseat, waiting for her own turn at the wheel. Her hair was brown, her nose a bit sloped and her smile wide as he sped around the cones and hit the oil patch. That was long ago and he knows would never be repeated today. And yet in many ways he is still back there, skidding sideways into a new season while marvelling at the sight in the rear view mirror.

He was thinking about the strength of memory, how the muscles of his mind sometimes lost their grip on loved ones now gone, their faces and connections becoming more wind than solid ground.

He thought of one man in particular, the way he sipped his beer while listening intently, his long fingers and his mentor’s nod.

He drove to the cemetery for a visit, long overdue, and walked the path of tombstones and then sat for a spell. The leaves rustled, a lily pad revealed its fragility out on the pond, a bluejay mimicked a hawk from a nearby branch, and slowly a clarity returned. The wind, it appeared, did have something to say about the strength of memory. They were together once again, seated across from each other, as if time had doubled back on itself.

He looked at a pile of brush, leaning quietly against a tombstone. It too had something to say but that would have to wait for another day.

Two fathers commiserate over hard mornings getting sleepy children ready for school. The kids wander about in angry fogs, the early bloom of a new school year already devoured by the reality of a pillow left too soon.

There is no time for leisurely coffee or morning reflections to stabilize and guide the day. Instead chaos and inscrutability reign thanks to a seesaw of elephantine emotions emitted by the very small. Tempers rise, threatening to sink all boats before the first school bell rings.

Later that day, while watching the clouds muster and muse from above, one father breathes both easier and with difficulty. His mornings may have once been filled with solitary ease as they will be again when the children are grown, but is that what he really wants? His heart sinks and he vows to try harder.

That night he proposes family time, where they will all gather and talk and rejoice in each other’s company to offset the hard mornings. His children look aghast and his teenager runs for the stairs. “I think that sounds very unrewarding,” the teenager says as he disappears into his room, the door closing with a decisiveness that echoes across time, louder even than the morning alarm.

As the Island leans toward Columbus Day, naked moorings rival boats in the harbor and summer workers who could shoulder the extended season now eye the exit. But not all. A few say they want to experience a Vineyard winter, the dark and the quiet, the season of potlucks, thick beards and wood stove camaraderie.

The offseason is not for everyone but for those it does suit the ache runs deep.

He remembers his first Island winter, arriving to take care of his grandmother during her last months alive. A gray October sky brings him back to her living room, where they shared the journey of each day together while sitting in chairs that had shaped his body since childhood.

The memory arrives like a gift, blown in by a cool breeze. He closes his eyes and sits quietly, marveling at the pieces of his life, a puzzle he has long stopped trying to put together. He can see this more clearly in the offseason, along with the ghosts of his ancestors, smiling gently from around so many familiar corners.

A young girl is out of sorts and having trouble sleeping. She tosses and turns in bed and holds out her hands, declaring that they feel heavy, as if carrying a large weight only she can see.

Her father holds these hands, so small and sweaty, and tells her about a porch he passed while out walking that day. There was a lemonade stand tucked at the far end operated by a cherubic chihuahua and two stone swans standing watch at the entrance. Their long gray necks were adorned with an assortment of Mardi Gras beads, a colorful remembrance of things past, which they said included dancing until dawn. On the roof stood a fastidious squirrel arguing with a few gulls making a mess by dropping shellfish onto the walkway.

There was also a spider in the eves, grooming his sizable mustache, and a morning glory blossom presiding over a hummingbird marriage. He told her about all of this, but not his own part in the tale because by then the little girl’s hands had fallen open and her eyes had drifted closed as another remarkable day had its say.

Writing about October, the nature essayist Hal Borland once recalled an old Navaho prayer song:
Beauty before me, I return,
Beauty above me, I return.
Beauty below me, I return.
Beauty all around me, with it I return.

“It was a song of the Southwest, where the aspens are full of gold now and the scrub oak makes the foothills rich with wine; but we of the Northeastern woodlands should know such a song, when autumn comes down from the treetops. Beauty, the fragile but abundant beauty of the turning leaves, is before us, above us, below us and all around us.
“The birch leaves drift down at midday, a sunny shower. The sugar maples are pure gold when dawn light strikes through them; and beneath them the rustling gold leaf begins to cover the grass. The swamp maples are cherry red and knee-deep in their own color. The poplars stand naked in pools of tarnished gold, their leaves shed. The beeches are rustling with gilt flakes, to which they will cling for weeks to come. The oaks are leather-clad, russet and oxblood and purple and ruddy brown, brown as acorns, crisp as parchment.
“One walks in autumn now, beauty above, below and all around.”

And on the third day the sky turned gray and a fine mist fell. Out on the soccer field the young girls, not quite teens yet, didn’t seem to notice. But on the sidelines the parents huddled together, stomping their feet to ward off the chill as parents have done since time began. After three days of punching above their weight, of scrapes and shoves, of overtime miracles and evening celebrations, the tournament champion would be decided by penalty kicks.

The kickers were selected and the goalie took the long walk alone to the net. She wore an oversized orange shirt and thick gloves, and her ponytail twitched under the gray sky as she bobbed left and right and left again, blocking shot after shot. And then it was down to just one more save to secure the win. The shot headed for the far corner and she leaped, an orange blur with her arms extended. Time appeared to stop and speed forward as she floated in the air. Out on the field, the girls began to age, one by one, choosing prom dresses and taking driver’s ed, walking across a graduation stage and kissing their parents goodbye. Off the field, time rolled in reverse. Parents became children again, running hard as their parents returned to cheer them on.

It was an odd and crowded sight, all those generations moving together, but you remember it well because you were there too, cheering in the fine mist of an early October afternoon. And then, in an instant it was over. And of course you know the result, but let’s linger for a moment longer on the sight of a little girl in an oversized orange shirt, picking herself up from the ground as her team races toward her, the distance between them vanishing as they all fall onto the field as one.

An old man walks into a coffee shop. He wears a long gray beard and a hat filled with small wampum pins. He sits down at a nearby table, not making a sound or saying a word.

The old man sits patiently, as if waiting for something, and then from behind the counter it arrives. A woman leaves her post at the register and runs to the table. She gives the man a hug and a kiss on the cheek. “I do this every day,” she says out loud to no one and everyone — the people in line looking for doughnuts, a boy eating a cruller while doing his homework.

“I love this man,” she continues while walking back to the counter to get him a cup of coffee.

The old man smiles, stirs his coffee slowly and another day begins, with ritual and affection.

The water temperature in Edgartown harbor dropped this week from 70 to 59 degrees. On the streets, sweaters and down jackets appeared, along with fluffy winter hats.

Beards became bushier too, seemingly in an instant, perhaps mirroring those woolly caterpillars that announce a hard winter. Time to say goodbye to the outdoor shower and barefoot walks on the beach at sunrise.

But evening walks bring with them their own charms, as street lights smile in the dusk and store windows persuade in more subtle tones. Dusk creeps in quietly now, the better to hear one’s soul stirring, or those faint footsteps in the dark creeping up on you, belonging to a witch or werewolf or renegade snapping turtle with long, sharp teeth and angry claws. Boo! Halloween beckons. Are you ready?

The stroller nicknamed Bob came out of the shed Sunday, destined for a new owner. Extolled among other things for its off-road capabilities, Bob first joined the family some eight years ago.

Bob saw a lot of use over those years, carrying two small children over the dirt roads and mossy trails of West Tisbury and around the paved streets of Edgartown. Then suddenly the oldest child was too big for Bob. Then the youngest got too big.

The stroller is in the house now, ready for a little sprucing before the next owner takes the helm. A mouse has chewed one of its straps. Found objects from pockets included two small rock collections and a Lego firefighter with brown plastic bangs. The rocks were returned to the stream where they came from. The Lego firefighter found a spot on a kitchen counter.

Back in the shed a tiny blue bike has taken Bob’s place, waiting for next summer when the days are long again and sunshine warms the paved road near the house, inviting speed racing with training wheels.

Because he is restless and wakes early, before the sun has shown its eager face, and because he spends the time with two lit candles throwing their reflections on the wall, and because he reads a story in that dark flickering light that makes him sad, about parents not getting along and their young children paying the price, he walks upstairs to watch his children sleep.

And because it is still the deep dark of night, his children sleep on, his presence not shaking them out of their slumber, and because they are no longer small they do not travel in the night, kicking off their covers as they turn their fragile bodies around and around along the length of their beds, and instead stay glued to their pillows, burrowing under the covers in the now cold mornings.

And because he is still affected by the story and his heart feels heavy watching his children breathe, their chests rising and falling nearly imperceptibly beneath the blankets, he drops to his knees to hold his daughter’s hand, which she squeezes tightly as a slight smile appears across her face as she dreams of happy things, he hopes, and because he is on his knees holding her hand in the dark he prays and continues to pray that he will not disappoint his children and they will continue to remain safe and happy.

And because the dawn breaks then, his daughter stirs and turns to him, asking if it is time to get up yet. And because he says no, not yet, she smiles and says thank you as she disappears once more beneath the covers.

One day a grizzled veteran of the newsroom fell in love with a pig. Perhaps an explanation is in order.

On Monday the Martha’s Vineyard Public Charter School scarecrows appeared around the Island. It is a long tradition and many Halloweens ago, a Charlotte’s Web scene was placed at the Gazette. Wilbur was especially cute, made of wire, painted pink with little pink ears and wide pet eyes. One member of the newsroom staff was not nice to Wilbur and so a kindly bearded fellow favoring flannel, well worn hats and outdoor vests brought the pig inside and gave him shelter at his desk. After Halloween the rest of the creatures disappeared from the font lawn, cleaned up by the family who had created it. But Wilbur stayed on.

Much like Charlotte, the man looked after Wilbur. Whereas once a gruff corner man in the newsroom, a gentle side emerged. The man consulted the pig on hard design elements, the two snuggled together on trips to the water cooler, and were often seen whispering to each other on stressful deadline days. All was well for many years, until one day a young girl walked into the newsroom for her first ever visit.

“That’s my pig,” she shouted, pointing her finger at Wilbur. It was true, it had been her family who created the Charlotte’s Web scene so many years ago. The newsroom held its breath to see which way this would go, whether the man would grant the little girl her wish to be reunited or would he and the pig make a run for it. The little girl acted first.

“It’s okay,” she said. “I like knowing that Wilbur lives here.”

With that proclamation all was well, and the pig and the grizzled corner man of the newsroom remain a happy couple. And today a Darth-scarecrow appeared at the front door of the Gazette. So far no one has tried to bring him inside.

A mother, father and their kindergarten child park their car in the school parking lot. They get out and on the way into the school, all holding hands, the father notices a cool car — old and slung low. He mentions it and wonders out loud who might be the lucky owner.

The little girl, who moments ago was skipping along and singing a song about baby turtles, looks up and smiles. “I know who drives that car,” she says to her father. Then she turns to her mother. “Mommy, maybe you could call him and set up a man-to-man playdate for Daddy.”

The mother laughs, the father shrugs, and for all we know the man-to-man playdate never happened. But we hope it did.

Beneath a low hanging gray sky filled with islands of thick clouds, a group of birds work the surf. They fly low among the white caps, diving or landing depending on their desires. The wind flows fast and in the distance a kite surfer does aerial tricks of his own, his sights set on fun rather than lunch like his avian peers.

Eventually, the birds move on, but the waves and wind and clouds remain, carrying with them what appears to be a heavy burden.

A man watching from his car thinks that from this scene only the kite surfer is able to go to the polls today to pull a lever or check a box. But what if nature had its say, if election sites turned into scenes from Noah’s Ark, with representatives from all the multitudes of the earth able to register a squawk, a squeal or a roar. Now that would be something to see, especially as their lives depend upon the outcomes too.

A parrot died this week. Perhaps you heard, perhaps you did not. She was old but not ancient, small but not tiny, colorful but not gaudy. She also disliked men.

At a memorial service for the bird, her love of women, children and other animals was extolled. Then the names of the men she had bitten were read out loud. It was a long list, full of fine fellows who had their ears or noses chomped, been nipped behind the neck or on the fleshy parts of their fingers.

One man remembered being attacked as a guest during dinner, a surprise assault from above he never saw coming as he bent over some mashed potatoes. He recalled how, in the moment, the pain of beak on bone was real. But now, looking back, he felt somehow honored to have been chosen as a meal while he was eating a meal. Time does heal all wounds.

The conversations began years ago. Gentle nudging, outright begging, then silence, a giving up of sorts, he thought. But he was wrong of course. A little girl never gives up her dream of having a puppy.

Substitutes arrived. The baby chickens came by mail, the half-wild/half-tame rabbit burst forth from the woods somewhere. For a time the odd menagerie roamed the backyard and surrounding yards as one pack, and seemed to fill the ache in the young girl’s heart. But with the passing of the half-wild/half-tame rabbit something had to be done. He knew that, like he knew it was no longer just about easing the little girl’s sadness.

Yesterday, the chickens met their new friend, a small brown puppy the size of a stuffed animal. Both species mostly ignored each other at first, while backing away slowly. The puppy found its way into the little girl’s arms; the chickens circled the man’s legs. And in the space between, the memory of a rabbit lingered, a confounding combination of pet and free spirit he knew would never be seen again.

He was thinking about the nuns again, how they sat together around the fire passing a small stick, which represented who could speak. Each one had an allotted time, not long, to tell their story. He was there too, and in the way that life sends one down so many unimaginable turns this was a big one. What indeed was he doing swapping tales with a group of radical nuns on a gray dawn, after a weekend of fasting?

He still remembers that moment, on particular mornings like this one, holding the stick loosely between his fingers while preparing to speak. He never knows when the memory will reappear or why, this visit to a former self he had somehow misplaced, but he is always grateful for the visit.

The dark comes early now, putting the Island to bed with a quiet nod. On the beaches, waves roll in rather lonely, kept company only on rare days by surfers or seals.

The trees are bare and the hawks have good hunting, although the small mice and moles can find cover under the fallen leaves. But pity the chicken out now, roaming a field or backyard for all in the sky to see.

Lamps glow in windows at night, and smoke rises from chimneys. Footsteps fall lightly on sidewalks and cars feel oddly absent as a solitary figure walks toward the moonlight, leaving a trail of tears behind him.

Two strangers sit beside each other at a breakfast counter not long after dawn. As the coffee and eggs are served they get to talking. One is a senior, the other middle aged. The holidays are here.

As they talk, the senior mentions he saves newspapers and has a collection of very old Vineyard Gazettes. Later that day he drops off a copy to the Gazette office. It is indeed very old, dated Dec. 3, 1880.

The edition is a four-page marvel, yellowed with age, ripped in places and smelling of a mildewed history. The front page is half filled with advertisements, the other half a short poetic ode to the coming of winter and a long article about an English commissioner stationed in northern India. Inside, it is reported that there is good ice skating in Vineyard Haven, that several young men “were filled to overflowing with exhilarating spirits on Thanksgiving night,” and that a crew sailed out of Edgartown on a whaling voyage on the Schooner E.H. Hatfield. The crew list is included.

Nearby is an advertisement about a lecture for young men on the loss of manhood. Presumably, the young whalers bound for sea did not need such a lecture.

Happy Thanksgiving. May the past, present and future all join hands at your table.

During the Thanksgiving holiday he created an exercise video with his son titled Backyard Dad Workouts. It was satire, a dad forcing his son to do bear crawls on the lawn while he threw soccer balls at him to tighten the core. He made his son carry begonia planters across the deck, shadowbox with sidewalk boulders and do incline situps on the slide, all while playing the part of maniacal drill sergeant.

The next day there was no video, just the two of them going for a run together, their first such outing. There was no ironic hyperbole, no posing or personalities to create. They just ran and while they did he took note of his son’s form, the fluid strides and relaxed arms, the rhythmic breathing.

The father had always run alone, preferring the quiet to conversation or even music. But this was different, the sound of his son’s footsteps mixing with his own as dusk inched forward in the sky. Slowly, he picked up the pace until they were both near sprinting. Then he slowed down, the better to watch his son race on ahead of him.

When he turned the corner into the driveway his son was waiting, soccer balls and derogatory remarks at the ready. If he wasn’t so winded he would have smiled.

While out walking his puppy he was stopped, again and again and again. The puppy is a friendly fellow and also approaches anyone. A few hundred yards could take hours as a veritable village of encounters takes place.

While on the walk he recalled pushing his children when they were stroller age. He loved to go on long journeys, down streets and roads, stopping under the shade of large trees to pass the time and watch the world go by. Only it didn’t. Instead, the world came to him, to say hello, to wave at the baby, to connect.

The puppy reminded him of those days, not the exhaustion of a newborn, although it did bring back those feelings too. Rather, it was these connections with strangers, all smiling and sharing a moment with him, something that never happened, at least to him, when walking alone. This pleasure of interaction, whereas before there was none, with people of all shapes, sizes and affiliations made his heart feel full and heavy at the same time. If he could wag his tail he would.

On a calm blue day he watches two leaves race into the road, powered by a small gust of wind. They are brown and dry and make small scratchy noises on the asphalt. Suddenly, he begins to worry about them, these objects that moments before meant nothing to him. But now, as they pause on the center line, his heart feels heavy. A car is certain to come along.

He continues to watch and worry, about the leaves, about himself, about why there is no more wind to scatter the leaves to safety. He looks up and sees a squirrel racing along a thick branch overhead, a hawk circling higher overhead, and in the near distance a car cresting the hill.

He stops looking, walks into the road, lifts the leaves and carries them safely to the other side. Why he did this he is not entirely sure, and yet later that night, while lying in bed wondering what makes himself tick, he is very glad he did.

He didn’t have far to go, while out walking, before he was joined by ghosts. It is a fact of life this time of year, when the streets are bare, the wind cold, and the only sound a woodpecker hard at work for a meal. The ghosts are always from the past, and he enjoys strolling arm and arm with those no longer present and catching glimpses of his younger self. Sometimes he wonders where the ghosts of the future hide, although he knows that is a much slippery business as paths continue to diverge.

As he walks, the streets become more crowded, with relatives, friends, his first car, past pets, teachers and mentors, a gnarled tree he used to climb. He sees himself at his worst and best and so many places in between. And then just as quickly everyone disappears and only the woodpecker remains, still hard at work, banging its beak against a tree. He is mesmerized, even more so when the woodpecker turns to look deeply at him, a ghost of Christmas present, of this he is almost certain.

They were sitting side by side, the two of them, trading sentences on the page, a teacher and his middle school student. Back and forth they went, one sentence at a time, inventing a new world.

They began by creating a quiet lane, flanked by rustic mailboxes, a towering oak tree and a border collie named Joe Bob with a fondness for the novels of Dostoyevsky. That had been the teacher’s idea, but the student picked up the thread as they left the lane and journeyed on the page to a school, conjuring up a little girl named Lulu, prone to loud profanity and a bloody nose that sprayed like an outdoor shower.

They worked like this for an hour, taking turns moving the story in odd places, the focus on language and surprising the other. When they finished and the lesson was over, they were both sad to leave this world of make believe.

See you next week, they both said, copies of Crime and Punishment tucked under their arms and visions of Joe Bob barking his approval in their heads.

When asked about giving baths, the dog trainer said take it slowly. Put a towel down in the bathtub with some treats and toys. No water at first, just create a fun space, building positive associations. Take it slowly, she said again, it might be days or weeks before you add water.

He marveled at this softer, gentler way of dog rearing, agreeing it sounded like a good idea. He remembered choosing to co-sleep with his kids, rather than the Ferber method — he also remembered years of sleepless nights. But surely it had been worth it for their psyche, as it would be for the puppy too. At least he hoped so.

Later that afternoon, he took his daughter, her friend and the puppy to the park to shoot baskets. It was 25 degrees out, but they were determined. Soon the girls had to go to the bathroom. Hardy souls, they ducked behind a shed at the edge of the woods. But the puppy joined them, reveling in the oncoming shower from head to tail.

There would be no gradual bath time after all.

He watched from above while pedaling a stationary bicycle as a group of toddlers and infants played in the pool with their parents. It was some sort of swim class, a get to know the water kind of thing he dimly remembered doing years before with his own children.

The kids all laughed, their mouths open, smiling like baby dolphins as they held pool toys in both hands and kicked with their chubby feet. The group had formed a circle and an instructor led the way with songs and movement. The children patted the water with their hands while their parents held them afloat as they would do for the rest of their lives.

As he watched, he became aware of a lightness and joy now riding with him. Once again he too held his own children in their swim diapers and caps, while they kicked and laughed and grabbed onto his ears and nose with glee.

All this while riding a bicycle to nowhere, he thought, as he slowed down his momentum in a way he had not thought to do so many years ago.

From all of us at the Vineyard Gazette Media Group, may you enjoy a warm, safe and joyous holiday season in the company of family and friends.

christmas photo

Bottom row: Susan Catling, Landry Harlan, Vanessa Czarnecki, Jane McTeigue, Bill Eville and Artichoke, Noah Asimow, Holly Pretsky, Hilary Wall

Middle row: Nicole Mercier, Carol Ward, Skip Finley, Jane Seagrave, Vivian Ewing, Alyssa Lodge, McKinley Sanders, Sarah Gifford, Kathy Agin

Back row: Mark Alan Lovewell, Graham Smith, Steve Durkee, Garrett Burt, Gary Cook, Jared Maciel, Julia Wells, Amy Kurth, Susie Middleton, Frederica Carpenter
Not pictured: Paul Schneider, Steve Myrick, Jeremy Smith, Jessica Peters, John Barros, Karl Klein, Khalid Jackson, Milen Kostadinov

Note: The Notebook will be off on Christmas Day.

The chicken coop sits at the edge of the yard, under the tree house. Each evening the five chickens return, hop onto their roost and huddle together as one. All that remains for him to do is say good night ladies and shut the door.

Yesterday only three chickens returned at the end of the day. An hour after dusk a fourth returned, agitated and looking over its shoulder. He kept the door open for as long as he could while searching for the remaining chicken. Eventually he gave up, knowing that even if the chicken was still alive, which was improbable, surviving the night would be impossible.

He walked indoors with a heavy heart and told his young daughter the news. She ran to the coop to see who was missing. “It’s Maya Rose,” she cried. “My favorite.”

They sat together on the couch remembering Maya, the chicken who wanted to be a house pet, running inside whenever there was an open door and walking up the stairs to roost on the little girl’s bed. Maya liked to greet the ferry too, the only one calm enough to stay nestled in the girl’s arms while friends were welcomed to the Island.

In the morning he searched again, finding the body not far from home. “I need to see it,” the little girl said.

“Are you sure?” he asked. “It’s a hard thing to see.”

“I’m sure,” she said.

He stood back and watched his daughter walk into the woods. She looked so small out there among the trees and fallen leaves. It was a cold morning and the air stung his throat.

Directory

Sections

Towns

Notebook Archive - 2018

Directory

Sections

Towns

Notebook Archive - 2018

Tuesday, January 2

Friday, January 5

Tuesday, January 9

Friday, January 12

Tuesday, January 16

Friday, January 19

Tuesday, January 23

Friday, January 26

Tuesday, January 30

Friday, February 2

Tuesday, February 6

Friday, February 9

Tuesday, February 13

Friday, February 16

Tuesday, February 20

Friday, February 23

Tuesday, February 27

Friday, March 2

Tuesday, March 6

Friday, March 9

Tuesday, March 13

Friday, March 16

Tuesday, March 20

Friday, March 23

Tuesday, March 27

Friday, March 30

Tuesday, April 3

Friday, April 6

Tuesday, April 10

Friday, April 13

Tuesday, April 17

Friday, April 27

Friday, April 20

Tuesday, April 24

Tuesday, May 1

Friday, May 4

Tuesday, May 8

Friday, May 11

Tuesday, May 15

Friday, May 18

Tuesday, May 22

Friday, May 25

Tuesday, May 29

Friday, June 1

Tuesday, June 5

Friday, June 8

Tuesday, June 12

Friday, June 15

Tuesday, June 19

Friday, June 22

Tuesday, June 26

Friday, June 29

Tuesday, July 3

Friday, July 6

Tuesday, July 10

Friday, July 13

Tuesday, July 17

Friday, July 20

Tuesday, July 24

Friday, July 27

Tuesday, July 31

Friday, August 3

Tuesday, August 7

Friday, August 10

Tuesday, August 14

Friday, August 17

Tuesday, August 21

Friday, August 24

Tuesday, August 28

Friday, August 31

Tuesday, September 4

Friday, September 7

Tuesday, September 11

Friday, September 14

Tuesday, September 18

Friday, September 21