Lloyd Raleigh is bent double , trying to negotiate his way through a dense thicket of catbriar in the moist wetands of Brookside Farm. As thorns entangle his jacket, a soup of leaf mold and sphagnum moss sucks his boots deeper into the mud.

“I kind of like this spot,” he says. “It tells us a lot about the land.”

When my aunt approached a toll booth, handed the toll-taker a fresh Kleenex and blew her nose in a five dollar bill, we knew she was a bit distracted. She often used the wrong word to describe something, and once, in a conversation about china at a dinner party, proved her point by flipping over a full plate, scattering potatoes, beans and lamb, as well as her tablemate.

Not Quite a Riot

From Gazette editions of May, 1960:

It has been two years since Mary Fuller died. She was my mother, and there are still some people around who remember her as the director of the Vineyard Haven Library from 1980 to 1990. She had stated long before her death that there was to be no obituary, and in grief and confusion, two summers ago I complied. But as time has moved on, I have felt the need to reach out to the Vineyard community, partly in response to many who have wanted more than our private West Chop service afforded.