Opinion
Old Houses, Town Stewards
What next for Tea Lane Farm in Chilmark? A cloud of uncertainty now hangs over the project to restore the farmhouse after voters rejected a spending article for a second time at a special town meeting Monday. What was most troubling was not that voters turned down the request for $550,000, but that they did it so quietly. It was puzzling to see almost no discussion on the town meeting floor about this important project which has been actively on the drawing board for two years.
Border Lines
From the Gazette Fence File:
The boulder-strewn hills of the Vineyard are enduring but many of the relics of a more recent past are not. Consider the split rail fences of fragrant cedar. A generation ago they were familiar in the landscape, though not so much as the stone walls.
Recently I wrote an article about Angel Flight Northeast that will be published next month in Avalon Magazine. Angel Flight Northeast is an organization of volunteer pilots providing free flights (in very small planes!) to those requiring medical care.
With sea level rise at our doorstep and storms chomping away at the shoreline it’s time to rethink an economy based largely on seasonal, coastal recreation. Why? Because as Ginny Jones, a lifelong Islander from a farming family muses so succinctly, “We can’t eat tourists.”
Saltwater Heroes
The idea came from an eight-year-old Chilmark boy. Three years ago young Jack Nixon was reading journalist David Kinney’s book The Big One, the hot new fishing read of the summer that year about the Martha’s Vineyard Striped Bass and Bluefish Derby. As Jack was reading, he gazed at a newspaper nearby and had a sudden thought: He wished that some of the men who had served in Iraq and Afghanistan could fish the derby.
MCAS Scores: What Lies Beneath
Examining the results of the annual statewide standardized school exams can be like being a kid again and looking under a big rock in the woods. We all recall that sense of discovery, turning over something that from above appeared a lifeless shape of stone and finding that it sheltered teeming activity of all kinds. Suddenly there was much more to study.