’Twas Christmas Eve and Santa Claus / Was on his annual trip / By reindeer from the cold North Pole / ’Twas not, of course, by ship, / For his landing place this year, / “Aquinnah,” Santa said, / But the reindeer saw no light at all / As usually they had / When in the past he’d chosen it.

When I was a child we would occasionally take up-Island excursions to Menemsha or Gay Head. En route, there would often be a stopover at Indian Hill.

Great-grand-daughter of a Vineyard whaling captain, daughter of a West Tisbury poet and a New Jersey educator renowned for his Island linoleum block prints, longtime West Tisbury bed and breakfast proprietor, mystery book writer and writing teacher, Cynthia Riggs has now written not only of her Vineyard years but of much more.

Now is the season of roses and they are adorning West Tisbury roadsides and gardens and fields.

There was a homecoming at Whippoorwill Farm in West Tisbury on Wednesday for a rescued barn owl.

I know it is unpopular, but I am a lifetime lover of snow.

Then out across the ocean, Martha’s Vineyard came in view, and St. Nick suggested landing, to all his reindeer crew, in Ocean Park in Oak Bluffs, when they above it flew.

Now is the season for leaf-crunch ing. Of course, the red and gold leaves on the trees remind us that it is still fall. But on the ground there are crisp brown ones that I have been enjoying, too.

As this summer departs, I am remembering summers long past, during the 1940s and ‘50s, that were so different from today’s Vineyard summers.

Clearly, I have a propensity for islands.