Earlier this year, the Gazette interviewed Geraldine Brooks as her latest novel, Caleb’s Crossing, was about to be released:
Pierre Bonneau was in Paris teaching a full immersion language course for the University of Arizona when he got an e-mail from his wife back in Tucson. It contained an advertisement for a French teacher at the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School and a brief note: “The kids and I have thought about this — you need to apply here.”
Need a French-themed fundraiser for language students hoping to travel to France next spring school vacation? How about pizza night at the Orange Peel bakery in Aquinnah?
If you think pizza isn’t particularly French, consider this: France is the second-biggest consumer of pizza in the world. (The U.S. comes first; Italy only a distant third.) Furthermore, a French chef currently holds the title for the world’s best pizza recipe, with a topping featuring fois gras.
Lloyd Raleigh is bent double , trying to negotiate his way through a dense thicket of catbriar in the moist wetands of Brookside Farm. As thorns entangle his jacket, a soup of leaf mold and sphagnum moss sucks his boots deeper into the mud.
“I kind of like this spot,” he says. “It tells us a lot about the land.”
At first, students didn’t know what to make of the pile of cedar saplings and sheets of poplar bark piling up in Harvard Yard. They were even more perplexed when Mark Andrews, cultural resource manager for the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah), assisted by fellow Vineyarders Jonathan and Elizabeth Perry, began showing a group of volunteers how to sink the saplings deep into the Yard’s hallowed lawn.
For more than a hundred years, the barn at Hoft Farm has born witness to the hard work and heartbreak of Vineyard rural life. The large barn, rising three stories high from its substantial fieldstone foundation, marked the ambition and optimism of the Hoft family, who settled on the Island after ocean journey and shipwreck. John Hoft, born in Hamburg, Germany, planted an orchard of apples, pears, peaches and plums.
