We were Vineyard summer dinks, or at its most deroga tory, just dinks. We drove up from New Jersey each year, just after school let out, and stayed until Labor Day in my grandparents’ house on Pennacook avenue in Oak Bluffs. My mother, a teacher, stayed the whole summer, too, but my father had to make do with weekends and whatever vacation he could save up.

I heard tales from my mother of how lonely my father was sweating it out back home. We lived close to the stinky part of New Jersey where the air smells like a bad meal left out to rot for weeks.

This haiku sort of sums up my seventh summer. It began with a tonsillectomy. In my ether-induced slumber I imagined death, a big-eyed, long-fanged grotesque who resembled the love child of Count Dracula and Betty Boop, entering the operating room. He stuck his long slimy arm down my throat, knocked out my two front teeth and yanked out my tonsils, my adenoids and my soul.

Driving along State Road in West Tisbury, one might not notice a new addition to the landscape, but peer closely and you will be rewarded.

Its beauty is so mysterious, so rare, it stops you in your tracks. The big leaf magnolia, with its expansive white flowers and foot-wide leaves the size of canoe paddles, has captivated visitors to Polly Hill Arboretum for years. Polly Hill grew it from seed and was so awestruck that she named the tree after her husband, Julian Hill.