Each week the Vineyard Artisans gather at the Grange Hall in West Tisbury on Thursdays and Sundays during the summer and shoulder seasons. A stroll through the aisles can feel at times like a tour down Diagon Alley. Who knows what one will encounter around the next corner? There are homemade brooms, jewelry, alpaca fleece and blackmith fashions. The materials range from leather to clay, reclaimed wood to wool, whelk to sheepskin.
Six years ago when Flatbread Company founder Jay Gould called Tina Miller to ask if he should open a restaurant at the former home of The Hot Tin Roof, she advised him against it. She didn’t think there was enough of a market for casual family dining at the airport location.
A public meeting held by the Chilmark selectmen this week saw vocal opposition to the idea of alcohol sales in restaurants.
Chilmark is the last dry town on the Vineyard. The selectmen received a letter of interest two weeks ago from Bob and Sarah Nixon, owners of the Menemsha and Beach Plum Inns and the Home Port Restaurant, about allowing alcohol sales in restaurants.
Earlier this month the Ecuadorian community of Martha’s Vineyard celebrated their independence day at the Old English Gazebo located at Morgan Woods in Edgartown. The event began with the commemoration of another year of the Ecuadorian Heroic Deed of 1809 that led to independence from the Spanish crown.
Where have all the flowers gone? The line from the old Pete Seeger folk song is a fitting metaphor for the Vineyard as one season comes to an end and another one begins.
Labor Day weekend has arrived. Summer residents and visitors are packing the cars, taking one last swim, sweeping sand from the cottage before closing the door on another Vineyard summer.
Water is an essential ingredient for the existence of life as we know it. Water is the only substance naturally present on the earth that exists in three distinct states — solid, liquid and gas.
In the water molecule, oxygen is the central atom. It has four pairs of valence electrons surrounding it.
This past June I went back to Bimini in the Bahamas to see old friends and to locate a few places that I visit in my dreams. One afternoon I rode my bike from the south end of the island three miles north to the tiny settlement of Porgy Bay, where my wife Bonnie and I spent magic summers when we were in our twenties. I like to say to people that Bimini hasn’t changed much in the past fifty years but that is just something I wish to believe. I passed a new medical clinic and athletic center, and ungainly concrete houses on both sides of the dusty road.
On the west end of Edgartown a 350-acre plot of land called Pohogonot Farm is nestled deep in the scrub oak forest on the south shore of Martha’s Vineyard. In 1893 my great-great-grandfather George D. Flynn first visited Pohogonot Farm. He fell in love with this piece of property while recovering from a railroad accident, and ended up purchasing 1,500 acres of land between 1906 and 1917. Four houses built by the Samuel Smith family existed on Pohogonot when first bought.
Regional high school students start classes later than usual this year, but the fall athletes are already on the fields preparing for the upcoming season. Mornings and evenings bring a flurry of activity to the quiet school campus as football, field hockey, cross country, soccer and golf shake off the summer haze and get down to business.
It’s a time of tryouts, when varsity and junior varsity teams are created, and a time of camaraderie as teammates work through drills and circuits. It is also exhausting.
When I fell and broke my wrist in early August, my normal hectic routine — daily tennis, regular kayaking, and too many hours working at the computer — came to a screeching halt. With my left arm and hand encased in a high-tech black Exos cast, my choices at first seemed limited.