James Flight Alley, 81, former West Tisbury postmaster and selectman, conservationist and life-long Democrat, real estate broker, horse dealer, farmer, new- and used-car salesman, and owner, with his brother, John, and his late sister, Phyllis Alley Smith, of Alley’s General Store from 1961 to 1981, died in West Tisbury on Wednesday after a long bout with cancer.

Perhaps perversely, now that spring is here and the daffodils and forsythia are out and dandelions are starting to gleam along roadsides, I’m feeling nostalgic about snow. I missed most of this past winter’s Island snow, but on a recent trip I found it frosting the evergreen forests in Germany and Poland, and it led to a most serendipitous encounter.

Elisha R. Smith, an Oak Bluffs farmer for more than three-quarters of a century and for more than two decades the president of the Martha’s Vineyard Agricultural Society, died last Friday at his home in Vineyard Haven at the age of 90. It was thanks to his determination, hard bargaining and skill at dealing with people that, in 1992, the society acquired the land that is the site of today’s Agricultural Hall. The acquisition of that West Tisbury Panhandle property where the annual fair is held was one of the proudest moments of his life, Elisha Smith said.

I recently traveled to Turkey where I floated in a balloon over sandstone fairy chimneys, slept in a cave, tried to eat politely at a table just 10 inches off the floor and climbed and crawled in the pre-dawn up 6,000-foot-high Mount Nemrut to see monumental stone heads carved there more than 2,000 years ago. I did not steam in a hammam (a Turkish bath) because I had been soaped and sandpapered in one in Morocco last year.

I’ve been granted my wish for winter snow — albeit accompanied by temperatures of 10 to 12 degrees midweek. That was what the thermometer registered early Wednesday morning when I chose to walk. Even my adventurous, well-furred yellow cat declined to go outdoors as I set out, intelligently preferring the warmth of a bed to the frigid outdoors. On Tuesday, the day after the snow fell and temperatures were warmer, he had happily snuffled about in it. That day I had followed my usual route through the West Tisbury woods past Glimmerglass Pond.

Winter has always been my favorite season, so I was delighted when snow fell on Saturday just in time to welcome in the New Year. Admittedly, it wasn’t much of a snowfall, but enough to brighten the dead brown grass on fields and bejewel the trees for an hour or two that morning. It was wet snow, which meant soon there was ice underfoot, but fearing that with climate change there might not be another snowfall this winter, I went walking in it all the same. I took my usual, unadventurous route through the trees behind my house on Tiasquam Road in West Tisbury.