October’s Fine Wares

The harvest is payday. All the planting, tending and careful work turns time for picking, gleaning and eating. This is true on agricultural fields everywhere.

QUICK RESPONSE

Editors, Vineyard Gazette:

My family and I would like to thank the Edgartown police department and the Edgartown fire department wholeheartedly for their timely and effective response to the fire at our house early Monday morning caused by an act of arson. We would particularly like to offer our thanks and gratitude to Mike Snowden of the police department, who put his life in jeopardy by entering our house in order to extinguish the fire.

My cherry tomatoes have worked a miracle: they’ve made me regret the passing of summer. I don’t like summer. Almost every year it settles in like an occupying army and I just have to put up with it until it goes away. I love fall. Fall slips in, darts away, plays catch-me-if-you-can. Night closes in slowly from both ends of the day, polishing the remaining daylight hours till they sparkle, and the leaves rarely stop rustling. Summer’s torpor gives way to vigorous activity. I love the warm feel of flannel.

There have been many televised and Internet reports about potential Koran burnings and Muslim worship centers of late. Sadly, most of them have been from a biased viewpoint that does nothing to alleviate concerns, but rather continues to feed irrational fears of the unknown and the “other.” This is nothing new to Martha’s Vineyard as we continue to see in letters to the editor that oftentimes overtly blame an entire group (read: ethnic group) of people for the actions of an individual.

Autumn Tales

From Gazette editions of October, 1935:

We few, we band of brothers and sisters, all six billion of us on planet earth, have identified the problem and we’ve identified the solution. We’re all in agreement about who is what. Even those who are classified as the problem know they’re the problem. And yet they continue to charge around like the bulls of Pamplona. I’m talking, of course, about drivers of cars.