It’s the Berries

From the Vineyard Gazette editions of July, 1933:

Editor’s Note: What follows is the text of Martha’s Vineyard Museum executive director Keith Gorman’s letter to the members, published in the latest edition of the museum newsletter.

ROOTING FOR HILLARY

Editors, Vineyard Gazette:

I’ve scoured my e-mail list and shamelessly scavenged from all of my friend’s e-mail recipient lists, believing that the power of people and the Internet will work its magic to help my friend and fellow Vineyarder Hillary Landers, who suffered a spinal cord injury in the fall of 2006.

I Remember Jerry best at work

Two drawknives

A peavey

And an ax

A tractor trailer load

Of spiles

Oak trees

From up north

We’d bark

Me a teenage

Local kid

Him a father

Fresh from San Miguel

He came with Bernadette

And the girls

Work for Manuel Santos

In the cemetery

Yardwork

Conservation Today

When groups such as the Vineyard Conservation Society came into existence in the mid-twentieth century, the Vineyard seemed a simpler place. And their mission seemed a straightforward if sometimes daunting one: to protect special places on the Vineyard from the same sort of development that was gobbling up so much land on the mainland.

Counting Crows

Anyone who is out early in the morning these days will surely hear or see a crow, or a murder of crows, as groups of crows are called. They may be cawing from one tree to the next, alerting each other to the skunk dead in the road below or the field just planted with tasty seed corn. They may simply be conversing. But there is always an urgency in the voice of a crow.