Opinion

 

 

 
During President Obama’s vacation, I was driving down Middle Road in Chilmark because a portion of South Road was closed during his visit. As I was passing by the Keith Farm, the car in front of me suddenly stopped on the right side of the road.
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Where have all the flowers gone? The line from the old Pete Seeger folk song is a fitting metaphor for the Vineyard as one season comes to an end and another one begins.

Labor Day weekend has arrived. Summer residents and visitors are packing the cars, taking one last swim, sweeping sand from the cottage before closing the door on another Vineyard summer.

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When I fell and broke my wrist in early August, my normal hectic routine — daily tennis, regular kayaking, and too many hours working at the computer — came to a screeching halt. With my left arm and hand encased in a high-tech black Exos cast, my choices at first seemed limited.
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On the west end of Edgartown a 350-acre plot of land called Pohogonot Farm is nestled deep in the scrub oak forest on the south shore of Martha’s Vineyard. In 1893 my great-great-grandfather George D. Flynn first visited Pohogonot Farm. He fell in love with this piece of property while recovering from a railroad accident, and ended up purchasing 1,500 acres of land between 1906 and 1917. Four houses built by the Samuel Smith family existed on Pohogonot when first bought.
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This past June I went back to Bimini in the Bahamas to see old friends and to locate a few places that I visit in my dreams. One afternoon I rode my bike from the south end of the island three miles north to the tiny settlement of Porgy Bay, where my wife Bonnie and I spent magic summers when we were in our twenties.  I like to say to people that Bimini hasn’t changed much in the past fifty years but that is just something I wish to believe. I passed a new medical clinic and athletic center, and ungainly concrete houses on both sides of the dusty road.
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Water is an essential ingredient for the existence of life as we know it. Water is the only substance naturally present on the earth that exists in three distinct states — solid, liquid and gas.

In the water molecule, oxygen is the central atom. It has four pairs of valence electrons surrounding it.

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