1. Not Quite Reality, The Vineyard Show Debuts on ABC Family
2. President and Mrs. Obama Vacation on the Island
3. Wedding Bells Ring for Author Cynthia Riggs
4. Kennedy Family Puts Aquinnah Tract on the Market

The year in weather saw average temperatures and rainfall, but heavy snowfall.

The Vineyard received a total of 36 inches of snow this year, almost a foot above average. A huge blizzard impacted most of the northeast corridor back in February. Boston received 25 inches of drifting snow, but only five inches fell in Edgartown. This remains the worst storm of the year, and on the mainland it approached the worst blizzard of the decade.

I say this almost every day — today was one of the strangest days of my life. I began saying this phrase, genuinely, four years ago on the first day of my freshman year at Wesleyan University when the routine of my previous 18 years was first upturned. I didn’t realize that I was overusing the phrase, even though every night at dinner in Usdan, Wesleyan’s cafeteria, as I reflected on my day, my conclusion was always that it had indeed been the strangest day. After a few months of this, my new friends called me on it. Surely, every day could not be the strangest of your life, they said.

It was a dark but not stormy night. Just a merry crispness in the air. It was Saturday, two days after Thanksgiving, around the dinner hour. We were all snug in our post-tryptophan haze in Vineyard Haven when suddenly all hell broke loose outside. Here’s the play-by-play.

The freshman history classes recently traveled the Island’s African American Heritage Trail from Chappaquiddick to Aquinnah as part of their study of the history of Martha’s Vineyard. They visited the home of the Island’s only whaling captain, walked to his grave, paid their respects at the site dedicated to the life of Rebecca, the Woman from Africa and stood at West Basin visualizing the escape of Randall Burton, the man who had decided he would rather die than return to enslavement.

I went to a funeral last Saturday. Four days before Christmas, the weather was unseasonably mild. This funeral was at the United Methodist Church in the Camp Ground. Karen Berube had died of complications from metastatic breast cancer; she was 63 and fought her illness valiantly and cheerfully until the very last days of her life.

From the Vineyard Gazette edition of Dec. 17, 1948: A matter of a few hours may well alter the overall picture of the Island Christmas, but as this article is written the temperature is in the fifties, the sky is clear and blue, the sun shines brightly, the grass is still green, and flowers are still blooming in many, many gardens. Nature has not done its part yet in awakening the traditional Christmas spirit, which traditionally requires a biting atmosphere and a powdering of snow.

In his op-ed Conservation is Essential to Save the Striper (Vineyard Gazette, Oct. 31), author Dick Russell suggests that recreational and commercial fishermen stand at odds when it comes to striped bass conservation. He claims that commercial striped bass fishermen from Massachusetts and menhaden fishermen from Virginia are obstacles in the way of stronger protections for striped bass.

I would like to remind our local newspapers that the town of Tisbury did not reject the connector road proposal. At our recent town meeting, a sizable majority, close to two-thirds, voted in favor of the plan.

The Nature Conservancy would like to thank our partners in this past year’s oyster restoration project in the Tisbury Great Pond, straddling the Chilmark/West Tisbury town line at the mouth of Town Cove.