Memorial Day 2011

Our Changing Island

May Days

Perhaps encouraged by the drenching rains this month, Vineyard woods and meadows are blanketed with wildflowers of every description. Bright yellow buttercups and dandelions, white starflowers and fragrant wild lilies of the valley dance along roadsides. Trailing arbutus adorns rutted old roads, wild strawberry flowers are blooming and soon tiny bluets will be studding the fields.

A Night to Remember

Word Play

Fis-SIP-par-ous — adj. Tending to break up into parts, divisive.

It’s often depressing to read about the world outside our own lovely Island, but we do it anyway and occasionally we learn a new word or gain a new insight about some aspect of our own situation. Venerable foreign correspondent John F. Burns of The New York Times was our source for both last Sunday in an essay on the elusive trail of Osama bin Laden.

Town Meeting Report Card

Vigorous selectmen’s races in three towns. Feisty debates on issues small and large, from streetlights at Katama to beer and wine provisions in West Tisbury to new rules for swimming pools in Chilmark. A financial squeeze caused by shrinking revenues in a stubborn economic recession that keeps hanging around like a bad cold. These were the hallmarks of the annual town meeting season on the Vineyard this year, which draws to a close next week with the town meeting and election in Aquinnah.