New around here? Forget logic or GPS or sensible street names—finding your way around the Vineyard requires a sense of humor, a little extra time, and a vehicle you don’t mind trashing.
There are places in which we live that are easily quantified and qualified. They are light, they are dark. They are open, they are closed. They are intimate, they are populous. Then there are those spaces that are less easily defined—they fall in the gaps of grey. The beautiful in-betweens.
When summer rolled around, my dream as a kid of eight or nine was to join some pals on a lake somewhere in Wisconsin or Indiana to see how the rustic half lived and played. I spent my formative years in an urban neighborhood of crammed apartment buildings on the north side of Chicago. A time away in an overnight camp for a few weeks seemed like an idyllic interruption. But being the only child of a Jewish mother whose hobby was planting and nurturing fears, I was lucky if I was allowed to cross our street by myself.
I found myself knocking on an unlikely door recently. I’m not a religious person, but I arrived at the door of St. Augustine’s church to light a candle for a friend. As I struggled with the key code, a woman appeared next to me and let me in. After lighting the candle I turned around to see the late afternoon sun streaming through the stained glass windows, projecting disco-ball-like colored spots of light on the pews. Beautiful, delicate light. And I started to cry.
The first time I was told I had to play a game in order to get my Christmas presents I was annoyed. Isn’t it enough that I was good (well, mostly) for the entire year? Isn’t life the game you play to get the prize of Christmas presents? Now I had to figure out clues to determine which of the anonymously wrapped gifts under the tree was mine. How unfair.
When I went from seasonal to full-time Island dweller I thought it was temporary and then eight years later, when I left, I figured that was temporary, too. The Vineyard had become my home but in 2013, I was newly engaged and before my guy and I took the marital plunge we wanted to try living somewhere new.
I never set out to be a designer. A one-off stint doing album art led to more album art, then a paint scheme for Nascar, branding a law firm and marketing for non-profits. Before we knew it, my wife and I had a full-blown design business with an international client base. Our “work from anywhere” business model led to Martha’s Vineyard.
The price tag on the 200-year-old Cape was $135,000, but it was a house that cried out for a wealthy owner who could dash off checks to a platoon of plumbers, carpenters, electricians and masons.
Writing about food, which I’ve done now for just a few months shy of a decade, was never something I set out to do. And, especially at the beginning of my career, it was anything but trendy or glitzy. It was dirty, gritty, and messy – at times quite literally.
