Behind the white clapboard house in prime Edgartown real estate, around the back fence — high steel fencing, covered in turf and topped with razor wire — a patch of grass has been turned over to a garden. Like other gardens in the neighborhood it is dormant and frozen over now, but soon it will be carefully tended by a crew who will pull its weeds, plant and harvest its vegetables, more than willingly and for no pay. Indeed, each man must earn his time there.
“Chickens! Are you ready?”
Upstairs at the Vineyard Playhouse on Tuesday, artistic director M.J. Bruder Munafo was calling two actors for their cue.
Predicitify, an online feature at the inaugurally feverish Washington Post, can’t yet guess what color tie President Obama will be wearing when he drops the hyphen-elect from his job title (bets favor solid blue). But Washington lawyer and longtime seasonal Islander Cara Grayer Johnson can predict exactly what her husband and father will be wearing around their necks when they hand over tickets to attend the inauguration Tuesday: her own designs.
While Methodists once came by the hundreds to worship on Martha’s Vineyard, now they come by the handfuls. The congregation that helped shape the Island’s history is grappling with such declining church membership that three of the four United Methodist congregations on Martha’s Vineyard have voted to consolidate into a single congregation.
Resting unfinished on 18th street in Edgartown is a two-story, two-bedroom wonder. The wonder is not revealed so much in the sturdy shingled Colonial construction itself — though its new owners will tell you proudly they “just love this house so much” — but in the story of how it came to be here at all.
This home should have met the bulldozer this time last year, by all wisdom.
You really need a plan if you’re venturing out this weekend. More than a plan — a strategy. And sustenance — no, on second thought you can just work stops for free snacks into your strategy. But sneakers might be a good idea, for sprinting between events during this, the annual Christmas in Edgartown weekend extravaganza.
Or maybe just forget all that and take a sanguine, Santa’s-coming-to-town approach to walking around the whaling captain’s village for the whole weekend.
