Opinion
Quiet Island
The Island in winter is often a calm affair. But during this first week of March it has downshifted to a gear slower than walking, slower even than sitting on a stump and breathing in the landscape. It is as if the Island has been emptied of the last remnant of noise and rambunctiousness left.
It is winter break here on the Island. The schools are all closed.
What follows is an edited selection of reader comments from the Gazette Web site last week.
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Court Rules No Price Fixing on Gas
PURE JOY
Editors, Vineyard Gazette:
Life seldom makes sense, especially when those we love are taken from us in ways that are as terrible as they are inexplicable, and such was Joy Flanders’s untimely passing as the end result of a 15-month battle with melanoma which she waged so bravely.
Editor’s Note: The following was sent by e-mail to Vineyard Conservation Society members on Wednesday morning this week.
Heeding the Call
From Gazette editions of March, 1936:
After five weeks’ delay, the schooner Alice Wentworth, Cap’n Zeb Tilton, sailed for Nantucket with two large tanks for the Island Service Co. Ice that blockaded Nantucket and made the passage between the Islands hazardous for sailing craft, was responsible for the long wait. It was a tug that finally succeeded in setting the schooner on her way, but not by towing.
Dandelion Gone to Seed
A sphere of silvery transparency,
at the top of a silvery stem.
Perfect in its static death.
But the next wind will blow it into seedlings,
will sing every tiny seed of it into a cloud
that drifts to earth,
to make another flower,
in another spring.
— Margaret Freydberg