Oak Bluffs business owner Dana Hughes is fascinated with smart marketing. “Like fantastic window displays, things people will remember ... in this economy, you have to have somebody remember you. That’s hard to do,” said the owner of Hair by Dana, one of the anchor year-round businesses on Circuit avenue for 15 years, shortly after she closed her shop in mid March.

Springtime’s probably my favorite season for biking on the Vineyard. The colors and sounds and smells are just the antidote to a long, gray winter; or, if you’re a seasonal resident like myself, it’s a great time to get reacquainted with New England. The weather’s cool enough to pedal fast without overheating, you don’t have to carry as much water, and the traffic is still relatively light. Of course, you do have the drawback that, of the vehicles that are on the road, most of them are landscaping trucks.

In his 1841 essay Circles, the transcendentalist philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson celebrated the moment when a visionary rises up amongst us. “By a flash of his eye,” wrote Emerson, the artist “burns up the veil which shrouded all things, and the meaning of the very furniture, of cup and saucer, of chair and clock and tester, is manifest.”