Ports of Call

From Gazette editions of November, 1935:

It was a beautiful fall evening on the Island and I was taking an after-dinner stroll with my children. My six-year-old son, Hardy, crashed about in the woods. My daughter, Pickle, not her real name but definitely her given name, walked a few yards in front of me.

Pickle is two and a half and becoming now a small creature of the world rather than just something of my own. She walked in front of me, not even looking back to see if I were following. I felt a tug at my heart.

Autumn Days

It was a flash of white foretelling the future, the fine white coating on the fields along State Road Wednesday morning. Kids in cars cried out, Is it a snow day? Not yet, thought their parents. The first killing frost came late this year; fall has been gentle and colorful and relatively peaceful, elections notwithstanding, and most of us are unwilling to let go quite yet.

Edgartown’s Too-High Horse

The six Island towns have long coexisted like members of a lively, diverse and sometimes scrappy family, each with its own character, personality and style, but with an unwritten inside rule: Never think you are better than someone else.

Lately Edgartown has begun to show signs of doing just that and it’s not wearing well with the other towns whose leaders are far too polite to say something about it.

Election Day 2010

How a prisoner is treated in the Island jail. How a wind power developer is greeted at the state house. How much sales tax you pay. These are only a few of the ways real individual human beings will be affected by decisions made in Tuesday’s election.

Conflict without Walls in West Tisbury