July Days

The last of the summer hay has been cut and baled. Swallows swoop around the farm fields, feasting on crickets and insects in the grassy stubble. The terrier chases the swallows in endless wide circles. The midday sun is hot now, the ocean water cold and perfect for swimming after a dusty morning spent leaning on the mower.

Time and Timing

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.

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.

From the Ashes

They were ready. Austin Racine and Katrina Yekel, who had bought the Cafe Moxie restaurant on Main street in Vineyard Haven in May, were prepared to work sixty-three straight days — all of July and August — to survive and succeed in their business, to make money during the Vineyard’s all-too short summer season, to help realize the dream that they both held so dearly.

Independence Day 2008

Small American flags flutter around the gravestones at the Westside Cemetery in Edgartown, where Bobby Hagerty has trimmed the old cedars and maples in time for the Fourth of July. The cemetery is a peaceful place to pass through on the short walk from uptown to downtown, all dusky grass and yellow sedum. The town superintendent doesn’t like the sedum and wants to get rid of it, but Bobby, who is a veteran tree and plant man, has told him he should leave it alone.

Bobby is right; the sedum is pretty.