The effects of climate change and commercial fishing on the marine ecosystem will be the focus of this year’s Menemsha Fisheries Development Fund’s series of programs at the Chilmark Public Library.

A new 45-foot-long mural depicting 400 years of Vineyard Haven history was unveiled on Saturday. The Tisbury mural, which overlooks the Water street parking lot and is aside the Stop & Shop grocery store, now greets any visitor to the town coming off the Steamship Authority lot.

On one side of the picture there are Native Americans at home near the shore. At the far opposite end of the nine-panel mural, there is a bustling community with the Steamship Authority ferry Island Home in the harbor.

The Island Food Pantry attracted a record of 160 visits in one week last February; a record income of $63,419 for the season; and a record for food expenditures of $56,758, coordinator Armen Hanjian reported after the pantry closed for the season.

The food pantry operates regular hours from mid October to mid April. Those in need can come to the food pantry once every two weeks on a Monday, Wednesday or Friday between 2 and 4 p.m. The pantry also responds to emergencies throughout the year.

Vineyard residents are invited to attend a free Berklee College of Music workshop demonstrating the Power of Music for Health and Education on Thursday, May 14, from 2:30 to 4 p.m. in the large dining room at Windemere Nursing and Rehabilitation Center.

The workshop will be presented by Karen Wacks and Wendy Krueger, music therapy professors at Berklee.

The Vineyard Conservation Society would like to congratulate Emma van Lohuizen, 8, of West Tisbury on winning the free raffle during VCS annual Earth Day Beach Cleanup.

Emma participated in the cleanup on April 18, she said, “to help save the earth,” and she took home a gift certificate to Riley’s Reads bookstore as her prize.

Emma reported that she was going to use her award to buy animal or nature books,

The country and the world marked Pete Seeger’s 90th birthday on May 3 with a well- deserved bash in Madison Square Garden, and many local parties, to pay tribute to a beautiful human being. In his later years Pete has been recognized as an icon of peace, justice, the environment and the powerless. Because I have had a long association with him beginning in the late 1960s, and particularly during the 1970s, I was asked to make some remarks at our local event, at Featherstone on Sunday. Here’s some of what I said.

The media has been saturated with the gripping story of four athletes who went fishing off Clearwater, Fla. National Football League players Marquis Cooper and Corey Smith along with former University of South Florida football players Will Bleakley and Nick Schuyler were thrown into the sea when their boat capsized.

A Merry Month

From earlier May Gazette editions:

May is here again with bird song and budding leaves. The month in Vineyard history has its unique significance, for it was on the 24th of May in the year 1602 that Bartholomew Gosnold in his “small barke” named Concord doubled a cape which he and his men called Dover Cliff on account of its great white outcroppings, later identified as Gay Head.

JUST THE FACTS

Editors, Vineyard Gazette:

We all expect that no good deed will go unpunished. That’s just the way it goes, right? But it seems reasonable to expect that those who administer the punishment will do it accurately.

The Gazette suggests that the houses at 250 State Road are estimated at $400 per square foot. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Sunday To-Do List: Call Mom

Just as there are stages of child development, there are stages of development in every child’s appreciation of her mother.