Jeff Scheuer
A few years ago, I was chatting with my mother, who is now 97, at her house on Menemsha Pond in Chilmark. At that point, the egrets on the Pond and her dog Lizzie were her principal interests.
It’s been many years since I last went to the Gay Head Cliffs at dawn on August 6 for the annual Hiroshima Remembrance Day ceremony.
On the Vineyard as elsewhere, this has been a summer like no other. It’s hard not to feel somewhat safer and calmer here.
Last summer, my mother came across this photograph of the painter and longtime seasonal Vineyard resident Thomas Hart Benton while rummaging in her house on Menemsha Pond. It was taken in the summer of 1960 by my father, Wally Scheuer (who died in 2004), on his motorboat, either on Menemsha Pond or the Vineyard Sound.
My parents and paternal grandparents were friends and neighbors of the Bentons, with adjoining properties straddling the then-Chilmark-Gay Head town line just east of Herring Creek.
It’s a late summer evening and I’m playing cards with my friend Heidi at the kitchen table as breezes waft through our rented farmhouse. It’s one of my favorite things about summer: how the wind fills the house like a welcome tide. Lie down near an open window and it drifts across your body in waves like gentle surf.
The air is warm, heavy and humid, and for me it’s like breathing cream. It makes the old house feel like a tent or open-air tabernacle. An animal snorts — a deer? Or is it Binty, the mare who pastures nearby?
Unlike the farmhouse I rent on Middle Road, or Binty, the horse who whiles away her dotage in the meadow adjacent, I am not yet ancient. So what is it exactly that scares me about new media — aside from the fact that I need my children to help me download apps to my iPhone?