After an emotional response from the community, leaders at the Martha’s Vineyard Boys & Girls Club this week defended their recent decision to abruptly fire two longtime employees of the Edgartown Second Hand Store and dismiss the store’s staff of volunteers.

In keeping with the theme, a conflict between police and demonstrators over a planned protest against the war in Iraq at the Vineyard Haven post office was resolved peacefully on Wednesday.

The Rev. Alden Besse and Sarah Nevin, co-chairmen of the Vineyard Peace Council, planned the display as part of a national campaign against the war titled Eyes Wide Open. The display features combat boots and professionally made banners that list the number of men and women who have been injured or killed in Iraq.

It’s been called the biggest event on the Vineyard social calendar, and the Possible Dreams Auction organizers found how to count just how big it had grown when a storm hovered over the lawns of Edgartown’s Harborside Inn on the first Monday in August last year.

Why does food cost so much on this Island?

Coming from Steve Bernier, owner of Cronig’s Market, the answer is part career grocer’s insider view, part disaster warning.

“There’s a flood coming,” said Mr. Bernier, sitting in a cocoon-like office space above the Cronig’s main store in Vineyard Haven. “The rise now is exponential, dynamic. We’re at the end game of what goes around comes around.”

West Tisbury selectmen on Wednesday swiftly voted to remove several No Parking signs recently placed across the road from the Lambert’s Cove beach parking lot after complaints came in from people who had paid $50 for a resident beach sticker and were worried they would have nowhere to park.

Wins Literary Award

Kelly Easton of Chilmark has won the Asian Pacific American Literature Award for her book Hiroshima Dreams. The book, set in Providence, was also the recipient of the ASTAL Rhode Island Middle School Book of the Year, and is a New York Public Library Book for the teen age group.

Appreciation Party

Friends are welcome to gather for an appreciation party for Penny Townes and Darlene Kelly, to honor them for their work at the Second Hand Store in Edgartown, on Tuesday, July 29, from 5 to 7 p.m. at Midnight Mermaid Gallery at 117 Main street in Edgartown. Gallery owner Rebekah Blu invites anyone for lemonade on the porch; vegetarian and sweet hors d’oeuvres are welcome, too. “Wear or bring your favorite thrift shop treasure, and come by to say thank you to Penny and Darlene,” Ms. Blu said.

In this serialized novel set on the Vineyard in real time, a native Islander (“Call me Becca”) returns home after years in Manhattan to help her eccentric Uncle Abe keep his landscaping business, Pequot, afloat. Abe loathes Richard Moby, chief of the off-Island landscaping business Broadway. He is irrationally convinced that Moby wants to destroy Abe personally, and Island-based nursery businesses in general.

Dear P:

The Island Diversity Council, in collaboration with the Island’s public schools, premieres a thought-provoking exhibition on the illusion of race — All of Us Are Related, Each of Us Is Unique — comprising 18 graphic panels and a film entitled Six Billion Races, which emphasizes the unity, as well as the diversity, of humankind.

The exhibition will be open 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday, July 26, through Friday, August 1, in the cafeteria of the West Tisbury School on Old County Road.

Three Martha’s Vineyard students were accepted into the prestigious OperaFest 2008 workshops on the Island, and two will be performing arias and scenes from famous operas with up-and-coming young singers from New Jersey on Saturday, July 26, at 8 p.m. at the Union Chapel in Oak Bluffs.

The Vineyard Students are Rosie Bick, who will sing Cunegonda from Leonard Bernstein’s Candide and Mitch Lowe who will sing in the Torreador Scene from Bizet’s Carmen.