Ferries were cancelled and schools and town offices shuttered Monday as a winter storm moved through the Vineyard, bringing blizzard conditions for nearly five hours.
Hot enough for you? The quintessential New England weather cliche is usually reserved for July, or August, not December, with church bells ringing carols, flip-flops observed and people hanging out on the Island Home’s weather deck.
Drenching rains and gale-force winds marked the start of the weekend, but forecasters and emergency managers breathed a little easier over the powerful hurricane churning through the southern Atlantic.
Summer arrives on Sunday afternoon at 12:38 p.m. Summer begins for us in that moment, though the weather and the signs have been around for a while. The precise time is more a concept than anything we can observe, measure in time, or experience. It is a moment when the overhead sun reaches farthest north above the equator, our time. If one could follow the sun at the zenith on this day and draw a line on the ground, the line would be what appears on maps as the Tropic of Cancer, a ring around the earth, at latitude 23.5 degrees.
The ferocious mid-winter weather that has pummeled the Vineyard with snow, ice, wind and frigid temperatures continued without letup over the weekend as another blizzard roared through. The storm began late Saturday and lasted all day Sunday.
After a night and morning of steady snowfall, the snow subsided early Sunday afternoon as a winter storm lashed the Vineyard. Ferries to the Vineyard have been canceled for all of Sunday and the Island is a blanket of white after hours of wind-driven snow for the second time in three weeks.