An Atlantic storm crashed over the eastern strip of Norton Point Beach in the last days of 2022, inundating Wasque wetlands and disconnecting Chappaquiddick once again. The breach created an old, yet new island to ring in 2023, a fitting start for a year in which many longstanding issues resurfaced.

Powerful state legislators on a hostile mission to take over the Island ferry system. Moneyed mainland developers on a singular mission to convert the last pieces of open space into huge profits. A vise-grip of housing problems for middle-income workers. Wobbly leadership. A voter-driven mandate for change on the Martha’s Vineyard Commission. Baffling tick-borne disease. Cold winter. Rainy summer.

On a sunny and busy day this July, Oak Bluffs post office square was filled with the sounds of a man and a woman arguing angrily about whether or not the town should install a $14 million sewage system.

Houses were sold as soon as they came on the market, listings under $200,000 became an endangered species, and building lots were almost as hard to find as a heath hen.

That was Martha’s Vineyard real estate 1998, according to a random sampling of Island professionals in the field, and real estate 1999 is likely to be the same, only more so.

Across the Island, hundreds of acres of beautiful land were designated as conservation property and protected from development.

Still, prominent conservationists joined together to make a dire prediction, that all the Vineyard's undeveloped land will be built upon by 2005.

Meanwhile, throngs of cars were increasingly viewed as villains on the Island's two-lane roads.

Martha's Vineyard 1996 was a year of storms. There were tempests of the natural sort: September's Hurricane Edouard, though less fearsome than predicted, tore into the Island with gusts up to 80 miles per hour, tossing tree limbs around like chopsticks. An unexpected January blizzard dumped 20 inches of snow on the Island, the biggest one-day tally in nine years. Rain was a dreary, dull constant. The Vineyard absorbed a record 61 inches of rainfall this year, and the Island often looked more like Seattle than a sunny paradise.

Explosive population growth and all its attendant social issues. A rebounding economy fueled by a robust real estate market. A painful crush of early summer traffic and along with it the sobering realization that the Island has nearly reached its threshold for seasonal population. A mild winter and a nearly cloudless summer capped by a peaceful concert in a West Tisbury field with an unprecedented gathering of more than 10,000 people. These are the benchmarks of the year 1995 on Martha's Vineyard.

September fourteenth. Summer was over and Martha’s Vineyard had already begun its annual downshift into fall. Children were back in school, the frenzy of August was a fast-fading memory.

With apologies to Red Sox fans, it would be easy to paraphrase the late, great Yankees catcher/philosopher Yogi Berra to describe the year 2021: déjà vu all over again.

A year unlike any other, 2020 brought with it sweeping change and challenges normally only felt on a geological time scale, all cast in a global pandemic.