This is a significant year for me. It marks my 75th summer of coming to the Vineyard. When my widowed mother and my stepfather got married, I came to his Vineyard Haven summer home as a very young teenager in 1937. Having lucked into a good thing, I kept coming back. I did miss a few early summers. In 1940 and 1941, we lived on government service in the Philippines, too far away to get back to the Vineyard. And in the World War years of 1943-1945 I was in the Army, living on the less hospitable islands of New Guinea and New Britain.

Vineyard summer, with all its last-minute social scramble, is over, and I’m back in New York. I decide it is finally, finally time, after 25 years, to create a new address book. As a member of the pre-computer generation, I had kept my addresses and phone numbers in a black leather notebook on small sheets of lined paper, and in pencil so that I could make erasures and additions and changes. After all these years it was a mess.

Trophy houses, as a group, are bad for the Vineyard. They are huge blots on our rural Island landscape. Summer people are overwhelmingly responsible for creating them. Do summer people create them out of ignorance? Or lack of taste? Or excessive pride? Or out of sheer, don’t-give-a-damn arrogance? In my opinion, all of the above. Many summer people believe that since a man’s home is his castle, why not build a castle?