The Chappy Community Center held its annual meeting last Saturday, August 11, with a large group of subscribers in attendance. I heard a few things that I think the Chappy community should know. First, subscriptions to the CCC are down. This is a surprise, since the CCC provides so many activities and programs in the summer, as well as throughout the year. Second, numbers of kids taking sailing lessons are down, mostly because kids have “aged out.” Once they become 16, they get summer jobs and don’t have time for sailing.
There are three places where you can check up on the schedule of Chappy Community Center activities and events: their very thorough website, chappycommunitycenter.org, their gigantic chalk board on the outside wall of the CCC and the bulletin board at the ferry point. You would need a whole page of the Gazette to tell it all, but I’ll mention just a couple of events.
How much longer do you want to hang on to those containers of yucky stuff that have been taking up space in the cellar? Don’t forget the hazardous waste pickup at the Chappy Community Center tomorrow, Saturday, July 21. Volunteers will be there bright and early at 7 a.m. until 8:30 a.m. sharp to collect household chemicals, old oil paint and small quantities of bad gasoline and used motor oil (the recycling center charges $1 a gallon for the used motor oil). The idea is to keep these materials out of the regular waste stream and out of the ground water. Sorry, they can’t take tires or water-based paint. Pimpneymouse Farm is providing a pickup truck to haul the hazardous waste to the Edgartown collection site.
Anybody who knows Nelson Jones knows what a stickler for details he is. But you have to ask yourself what he was thinking about while cutting hay in the roadside field at Pimpneymouse Farm. He left that uncut half standing intentionally to provide habitat for bobolinks and grasshopper sparrows. During mating season the male bobolink has a white back and a black underside which is unique in the American bird world. He also wears a fuzzy yellow hat. I guess the bobolink ladies like goofy-looking guys. Google bobolink and see for yourself. The grasshopper sparrow is equally interesting. This bird is so secretive that its migratory patterns are not thoroughly understood and its song is so shrill that humans often miss hearing it during bird counts.
My mother spent her childhood summers on the Chappaquiddick shore of Edgartown harbor in a house that was washed away in the hurricane of 1938. The house was on pilings right on the beach at the base of the bluff just below the last house on Caleb’s Pond Road. The remains of the pilings were still there 10 years ago. The twin to that beach house still exists halfway back along the shoreline to the ferry point.
Got ticks? Tell it to Dick Johnson. He’ll come right to your yard and commiserate with you about how bad it is. Then he will actually quantify your misery for you (count the ticks) and even tell you what you can do to keep your yard out of the Guinness Book of World Records as the yard with the most ticks ever. But even if you don’t see any ticks or signs of ticks, I’ll bet you that he can find at least a few around the edges of your lawn or paths.
