Martha’s Vineyard is a perfect place to start a life. Especially in the fall. A time for renewal. A time to re-tool. The next best thing to moving here is marrying here. The perfect place to start a life — together.

From the Vineyard Gazette edition of Sept. 7, 1945: The sale of the S.M. Mayhew Company general store in West Tisbury was completed last week. Charles A. Turner, proprietor, turned the business over to Albion A. Alley, long his chief clerk, and thus the establishment, conducted in the same building and on the same site since 1858, changed hands for the third time in its history.

There are many benefits and hardships from living on an Island. I would like to expound on one of the benefits which we experienced at our annual fundraiser this past August. I am referring to Rising Tide Equestrian Center’s party that was held on Wednesday, August 8. There are over 200 nonprofit organizations here on the Vineyard, and most of us rely on the generosity of Island residents and businesses to help us make our yearly financial budgets. Especially in this time of economic uncertainty, fundraising is a real challenge. Many businesses are asked many, many times for support from all of us in the nonprofit sector.

On three occasions this summer, either my wife or I required emergency service from the Martha’s Vineyard Hospital. These visits were not because of accidents with easily identifiable problems but were caused by sudden symptoms which, in two cases, required much testing.

It was the night of Sept. 11 when the president was mourning losses with families at Arlington Cemetery and elsewhere, and simultaneously dealing with world events in the disaster in Libya, and the outbreak in Cairo. And Mitt Romney took to the airwaves. With limited information, he chastised the president for not condemning this immediately

A note to Gazette readers and letter writer Larry Lewis. If more attention was given to energy conservation and efficiency in this wasteful society we live in, the need for problematical wind turbines would be lessened. Coincidentally, saving energy rather than making even more, will go much toward reducing CO2 emissions and addressing the climate crisis. A major contributor to climate change is the epidemic of carelessness, especially in the United States, regarding the use of energy already being generated.