The house at Tea Lane Farm in Chilmark needs $500,000 worth of repairs and renovations to prepare it for a future farming family, a special subcommittee told the Chilmark selectmen this week.

The committee of Frank Fenner, Leonard Jason and Dick Smith presented preliminary plans to the selectmen at a public hearing Tuesday night that show a much-altered interior layout but keep the existing exterior the same.

Tiffany Smalley yesterday was awarded her undergraduate degree from Harvard University, and with it the distinction of being the first student from the Wampanoag nation to do so since its first Native American graduate, another Vineyarder named Caleb Cheeshateaumuck, graduated in 1665.

Several major employers of Brazilian labor on the Vineyard spoke out this week against a newly-established Island blog which has accused them of hiring undocumented workers. The inflammatory blog has caused distress and anger among the Brazilian community as well as their employers.

Posts on the blog accuse entities as diverse as landscape companies, restaurants, retailers, even the YMCA and the Martha’s Vineyard Commission of illegal hiring and sometimes corruption.

The owners of the Home Port Restaurant announced this week that from now on they will only serve locally-caught fish and shellfish at the landmark Menemsha eatery known for its sunsets and swordfish.

The sunsets will of course stay but swordfish will only be on the menu at the Home Port if it has been caught off the Vineyard, restaurant owner Sarah Guinan Nixon told a gathering of Island fishermen on Wednesday night.

Summer is peeking in at the Island, with buds and bushes in full bloom and sunsets that spread across the western sky with rosy-hued fingertips.

And it’s summer for business too — shops are opening, gardeners and farmers are busy putting flowers and crops in the ground, and more than a few new shingling and painting jobs are in evidence around the Island.

Oak Bluffs will have to make do with a severely cut-down, no-frills budget this year after voters soundly rejected two Proposition 2 1/2 overrides in a special town election yesterday.

Catherine Coogan walked into the Family Planning clinic at 8 o’clock one morning this week, fresh from getting her three kids out the door and dropping them off at their respective schools, ready to do battle once again in the fight to keep her clinic open.

She was calm and collected, only momentarily frazzled when she couldn’t find the keys to her office in her purse.

For Martha’s Vineyard veterans the past year has been one of frustration as they have been forced to travel off-Island for treatment, and often left to pay the bill.

After administrators discovered more than a year and a half ago that the contract between the Veterans Administration and the Martha’s Vineyard Hospital had expired, Island veterans, some more than 90 years of age, have had to navigate a maze of bureaucracy and endure day-long trips to Providence, R.I., for basic treatment.

The latest victim of deep cuts to health and human service funding at the state and federal level, the Vineyard Family Planning clinic, which has provided Islanders with a wide array of confidential health services at affordable rates for some 30 years, is now facing the very real threat of closure.

Bar None

From a 1932 Gazette:

To those who would look intelligently upon the distant past of Martha’s Vineyard, an authority to be commended is Charles H. Brown, Vineyard Haven attorney at law. A Vineyarder of a Vineyard family, Mr. Brown was, nevertheless, born in Charlestown, Mass., but, coming to the Island at the age of six months, he may justly claim the Vineyard as his only home. His father was a physician who practiced on the Vineyard.