Opinion
My name is Grace Burton-Sundman. I have spent most of my life on Martha’s Vineyard. I attended the Tisbury School beginning in first grade and am a 2006 graduate of the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School. I also hold a bachelor of arts degree from St. Lawrence University.
From the Vineyard Gazette editions of November 1955: In the 27 years that one Edgartown family has watched Sheriff’s Meadow Pond morning, noon and night, storm and calm, summer and winter, they have never witnessed the phenomenon of a November freeze-up of that two-acre body of water. But that was what happened during the night of Tuesday, Nov. 22, 1955. Every square inch of the Pond was covered with ice, approximately half an inch thick, and the utter calm of the night and morning had turned the surface into a glassy mirror.
Mrs.
For my wife Cathlin’s last day of radiation treatment for breast cancer, the kids and I head into Boston to be with her. Eirene, aka Pickle (age four), decides to dress as the hobbit Frodo Baggins. Her costume includes a pair of blue jeans, a white mesh shirt she says is the elven material mithrail, and a long turquoise cape. She also insists that her face be rubbed with mud, as during Frodo’s travels to Mordor he was often dirty.
Hardy (age seven) wears the same pants and shirt he has worn nearly every day for the past few months.
In the home of my childhood we had no scissors, no flashlight and no scotch tape. Well, that’s not exactly true. We had them all but when they were needed we had no idea where they were. Everyone has one of the drawers that has three thumbtacks, two double A batteries rolling loose, a refrigerator light bulb still in its package and the baster that kept the drawer from closing the first nine times you tried to shove it shut. Well, our house, our entire house was that drawer.
When I first got married my mother in law was standing in my kitchen while I was making our spaghetti dinner.
They came from all over the mainland and descended on us. What made this a first was that the Island was the setting. Over 30 years of Thanksgivings, including 25 with a house we had in Menemsha, family members had never joined us to celebrate here. This time, 10 of them decided to come — because we now live here. It was a day of easy access — our Vineyard Haven home is walking distance from the ferry terminal.
What is Island character anyway? It’s not something easily defined, or even consistent from one place on the Vineyard to another. Yet it is exactly what the voters of Dukes County and the Massachusetts legislature sought to protect nearly forty years ago when they created the Martha’s Vineyard Commission and charged it with finding a way to preserve the Vineyard’s “unique natural, historical, ecological, scientific and cultural values” while promoting “the enhancement of sound local economies.”