It is early evening at the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School and the halls are empty, except for the occasional sound of voices escaping from classrooms in use for the Martha’s Vineyard Adult Continuing Education program — a fast-paced conversation conducted in French, a writing student reading her latest composition aloud, an intent discussion about the Arab-Israeli conflict. And then someone opens the door to room 314, and there is the sound of drumming, singing and clapping. The Introduction to Capoeira class has begun.

A little sun, a little rain, temperatures hovering in the upper 40s and the wind blowing hard — it was perfect weather for the opening weekend of Vineyard Youth Soccer’s little-heralded, largely-accomplished and newly expanded travel program on the fields at the West Tisbury School.

The Island’s travel soccer teams kicked off the first round of the season with home openers against several teams from the South Coast Soccer League on Saturday.

Lily Morris holds three feet of line, with one end in each hand and the rest dangling between her arms.

“This is the bitter end,” she says, indicating the portion in her right hand, “the end that you work with when you’re tying a knot. And this is the standing end, the part that attaches to something else,” she says, wiggling her left hand. “The section in the middle is called the bight.”

In many ways, autumn is the same as it ever was: the result of our Island, our region — this hemisphere — turning slowly away from the sun. Days still shrink as the nights grow longer. Temperatures gradually drop towards winter’s frigid lows, although perhaps not as low as they used to go. The trees still turn dramatic shades of yellow and red. And the indefinable qualities of the deepening blue sky, the brightening of the stars at night and the scent of leaves returning to the damp soil still stir feelings which defy description.

Mussels don’t taste like duck, but the difference between the flavor of farmed mussels and wild ones is like the difference between a domesticated duck and one born to the pond. The meat of a farm-raised duck is tenderer, milder and tamer — while a wild fowl is more toothsome, nuttier and gamier, admittedly not for everyone.