The sea delivered a bumper crop, direct to our beachfront, of late summer succulents. Seaweed piled high like a teenager’s laundry at the foot of the bed.

Proud purple

Shifting shades

Of red

Hugging clean green leaves

Tucked in sandy bed

Pumped up

With summer sun

Just fresh

From rain

I kneel

To bend

And pluck

Fistfuls

And drift

Into that picker’s dream

Of jelly jars

And old time

Kitchen smells

That linger

On the edge

So precious

And so real

—
Steve Ewing

No one ever walked away from a conversation with Tom Hale and said: “I wonder what he wanted to tell me”? Tom embraced life in all its complexity, passionately and fully. He cared deeply about the world around him, its past, its present and especially its future.

From the Vineyard Gazette edition of Sept. 7, 1945: The sale of the S.M. Mayhew Company general store in West Tisbury was completed last week. Charles A. Turner, proprietor, turned the business over to Albion A. Alley, long his chief clerk, and thus the establishment, conducted in the same building and on the same site since 1858, changed hands for the third time in its history.

Martha’s Vineyard is a perfect place to start a life. Especially in the fall. A time for renewal. A time to re-tool. The next best thing to moving here is marrying here. The perfect place to start a life — together.

After more than a year of stonewalling, Comcast has finally come up with a specific proposal to bring cable to Chappaquiddick, but it’s a nonstarter.

The sadly troubled groundfishing industry finally hit bottom with last week’s formal declaration by the Obama administration that the New England fishery is a federal disaster. It’s hard to find a silver lining in this story: yellowtail and codfish stocks so depleted fisheries managers are predicting the need for drastic cuts in catch limits in the coming year; small draggermen out of work with bleak prospects for the future; political gridlock among regulators.

What I don’t know is a lot! For example, I grow beautiful tomatoes, but at the point of ripeness something inevitably happens. Some four-legged or two-winged creature comes along for one bite. Then he naturally doesn’t finish the job but moves on to the next one.

There is a three-way tie for the bird of the week; sightings of not one but two Connecticut warblers, an American bittern and a buff-breasted sandpiper are all worthy, although they are somewhat expected at this time of the year.

The way to this caterpillar’s heart is through its stomach. No doubt you are familiar with the eating machine that is the subject of this week’s article. These black caterpillars with orange stripes have been everywhere lately, in your trees, on your deck, crawling across the driveway and squishing under your feet.