Chris Fischer
The fisherman were out at the Mill Pond in West Tisbury this past Sunday in search of trout, giving hope that this winter’s curtain call will soon be ending. The water is getting warmer and the resilient trout that hunkered down for the cold months in our ponds and streams now swim about and feed alongside the newly replenished stocks brought in each spring from hatcheries on the mainland.
Not too long ago, though not recent enough that I can remember what year it was, I lived in a cabin on my cousin’s land. During construction a giant boom truck lifted the recycled building into place, using a hole that was gouged into the roof to elevate it to its new foundation. New shingles were put on by the square, and pine flooring was added as well, along with a bathroom. Over time every new inhabitant would add something. To save space, there was a loft perched above the living area with a small wood stove beneath.
A garden which grows true to its own laws is not a wilderness, yet not entirely artificial either.
— From A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander.
Dirty Joe was a crow and a friend of my father’s when he was a child. When my father was nine years old he took an egg from a crow’s nest, hatched it, then raised Dirty Joe to be his pet. My dad would feed him cereal to give him strength when young, and kept him inside a cardboard box until Dirty Joe could fly and fend for himself. When that day came Dirty Joe would sleep outside in a tree while my father left his window open on the second floor of his family’s farmhouse in Chilmark. My father had no alarm clock then.
The lamb had been tethered in our yard for days in advance of Candice’s visit, peacefully keeping our grass down. A southerly breeze carried the fragrance of lanolin across the yard that drove my brother’s dog mad. Candice was a new friend about to graduate from college in Brooklyn, and the lamb would play an important role in her graduate thesis.
In his essay, Movable Feast, Henry Beetle Hough writes: “People talk of the good old days on the Vineyard — the nineties, when croquet and bicycles were fun . . . Someone was young then, and for him who was young it was the golden age.” Mr. Hough, the late editor of the Gazette, is speaking of the 1890s, and though the 1990s were a time when I was young and bike riding was fun, croquet has never been fun no matter how hard I try to give it a chance.