Dirty Joe was a crow and a friend of my father’s when he was a child. When my father was nine years old he took an egg from a crow’s nest, hatched it, then raised Dirty Joe to be his pet. My dad would feed him cereal to give him strength when young, and kept him inside a cardboard box until Dirty Joe could fly and fend for himself. When that day came Dirty Joe would sleep outside in a tree while my father left his window open on the second floor of his family’s farmhouse in Chilmark. My father had no alarm clock then.
The lamb had been tethered in our yard for days in advance of Candice’s visit, peacefully keeping our grass down. A southerly breeze carried the fragrance of lanolin across the yard that drove my brother’s dog mad. Candice was a new friend about to graduate from college in Brooklyn, and the lamb would play an important role in her graduate thesis.
In his essay, Movable Feast, Henry Beetle Hough writes: “People talk of the good old days on the Vineyard — the nineties, when croquet and bicycles were fun . . . Someone was young then, and for him who was young it was the golden age.” Mr. Hough, the late editor of the Gazette, is speaking of the 1890s, and though the 1990s were a time when I was young and bike riding was fun, croquet has never been fun no matter how hard I try to give it a chance.
I realized something after it was decided I would write about parsnips this week. I began my usual writing process which includes going to the library and taking out three books that have nothing to do with my subject. Lately they have been books about New England spanning the time from when the New World explorers began to land here, around 1600, to books critiquing private schools written in 1910. I had forgotten how many times people failed to settle here before they succeeded.
It has been a long time since I swam over to the Island, leaving you guys in the past. I meant to write to you sooner, but I’m a deer, so it’s been tough for me to find the time or the means to get a message to you. I met a Canada goose last fall who promised to pass along this message in his travels, but I never saw him again and am not sure he ever found you. I hope you are all right. I know food was getting scarce on the mainland and those coyotes were making themselves very comfortable in your parts. I hope you have remained strong and healthy.
When pulling carrots out of the ground these days, I am overwhelmed by their smell. I grab as many green tops as I can and yank them out of the ground, revealing many brilliant, orange magic-marker sized carrots caked with dark brown soil. The handling of the tops gives me the first tease of freshness, while the disturbance of the roots once out of the ground lures me in further, making a clean and muddy combination of aromas. Carrots pulled late in the season are masculine and tender.
During the summer I sell produce grown at Beetlebung Farm every Saturday morning at the West Tisbury Farmers’ Market. I don’t find it necessary to have any signage identifying our farm other than an old chalkboard with our name across the top that leans toward the front of our produce display. We use the chalkboard to advertise what we think is best that day, push products that are selling slower than others, or to express ourselves with a rotation of messages both clever and useful.
Roasted chicken is a comfort food I enjoy any time of the year. It is a simple pleasure that is accessible and easy for nearly all home cooks and provides a cost-effective meal for the whole family or for the individual with leftovers to be eaten for days and a carcass to be coaxed into a stock with endless potential. Even when purchasing a local bird for the average price of $5 a pound and up, the price per serving, with leftovers and soup included, is still in most shoppers’ price range.
In 2005 my sister Molly, then 12 years old, caught an enormous striped bass. It was so big when she finally hauled it onto the boat she backed away from it in fear and almost fell head over heels off the side of the boat into the churning ocean. I remember her telling me she thought she had caught an alligator. It is a story that has been told over and over again since then: a 12-year-old girl catching a giant bass and winning the Martha’s Vineyard Striped Bass and Bluefish Derby.
