By SQUIRE RUSHNELL

My wonderful wife, Louise DuArt, and I live in the Yellow Cottage of Edgartown, built in 1853. We love that our Island’s most prominent artist, Ray Ellis, calls it the “most painted house on the Vineyard.” Is it? I cannot attest. But, were I an artist, I’d have my easel permanently perched on Davis Lane.

We love that the Yellow Cottage makes us feel as if we’re living in a Leave It to Beaver home, complete with a Dutch door, and Louise baking scones in her June Cleaver apron.

Crows were the only inhabitants of the fair grounds at the Martha’s Vineyard Agricultural Hall in West Tisbury yesterday, a thick morning fog hovering over the freshly cut field. But come next week the Ferris wheel will be up, the smell of barbecue and fried dough will float in the air, and wide eyes young and old will peer into the hall to see if a ribbon rests next to their entry.

From a Vineyard Gazette edition of 1931:

READING RAINBOW

Editors, Vineyard Gazette:

Kid Natured

Mr. G. is coming. And who is Mr. G. you ask? He is the man your children want to see.

Performing songs like Sneaky Chihuahua, Lost Your Teach and Pizza for Breakfast, the man born Ben Gundersheimer is like a pied piper of sorts. He has won 10 ASCAP awards and toured internationally, appearing with Dan Zanes, Lunch Money and Secret Agent 23 Skiddoo. Don’t pretend you don’t know what those names mean and that you don’t sneak some listens even after the kids have gone to bed.

Three men were rescued from the water south of the Vineyard Saturday after their 20-foot pleasure craft began taking on water and sank, the Coast Guard said.

“Dear friends, people of peace. We gather to remember the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the horror of war and violence, and to rededicate ourselves to a peace sustained by justice.”

So spoke the Rev. Alden Besse to begin the Martha’s Vineyard Peace Council’s 34th consecutive remembrance of the explosion of the atomic bomb that would bring an end to the Second World War.

The plan to build a roundabout at the intersection of Barnes and Edgartown-Vineyard Haven Roads will now be reviewed by the Martha’s Vineyard Commission as a development of regional impact (DRI).

The roundabout has been the subject of a decade of planning and a bid is set to go out this fall. But commission members said on Thursday night the project plainly has regional impact, citing potential impacts on the intersections at either end of the Edgartown-Vineyard Haven Road.

The issue drew lively debate Thursday.

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W e keep reading. When the writing is bad, it’s a fleeting disappointment but when it’s good, there’s nothing better. When it’s good, it matters in the moment and in our memory; nothing matters more.

Few words are new, but lately they come at us in torrents. Words, words, words career toward us, screaming, tweeting, each true enough but incomplete. Words alone are isolating; writing, telling stories, that’s what takes the isolation away.