Tale of Two Libraries

The West Tisbury and Edgartown library building projects are textbook examples of the right and wrong way to do things.

Mr. Keating Goes to Washington

William Keating on Wednesday swore an oath to represent the people of the 10th Congressional District, including us here on the Vineyard, in our federal government. Say what you will about this moment in time — the worst recession, the most vicious partisanship, the biggest government, the least effective government — it all has been said before, in fact, it’s been said since the beginning.

Nature’s Everyday Strength

High tides follow low, the full moon follows the new, the spring ever follows the bitter cold. Nature freely offers us her perspective; the nature writer Hal Borland said, “If you would know strength and patience, welcome the company of trees.” So as we pause to make sense of this year’s elections, selectmen, line items and legal battles, we offer a selection of the Gazette’s observations of our natural world from throughout the months of Two Thousand and Ten.

•

Christmas 2010

A small gale lashed the Island early this week, bitterly cold and driven in from the ocean with steady light snow that frosted woods and farm fields and stone walls, turning the Vineyard into a Currier and Ives print overnight, just in time for the winter solstice on Tuesday. Soft, mournful blasts from the Nobska foghorn blew across the Middle Ground, echoing faintly up and down the north shore, somehow more reminiscent of June than December.

Martha’s Vineyard Commission’s Lesson

With the dust still settling from the Edgartown special town meeting this week, the next task at hand is for the Martha’s Vineyard Commission to ask itself some hard, probing questions, and central among them is this: Has the commission grown out of touch with the Island community?

Tuesday Vote in Edgartown

Special town meetings in December are often lackluster affairs; most of the time a town considers itself lucky if a deep off-season special town meeting attracts a quorum to conduct the necessary business at hand. Usually at this time of year it is housekeeping business that leads to the need for a special town meeting — bills from a prior fiscal year that require voter approval to be paid, emergency repairs to a leaky roof on some town building.