Sally Cook
There is so much uninterrupted time imposed by the stay-at-home order.
The old garage was demolished this past April. My father built the garage in 1950, the summer he turned 50 years old.
We all have a pond we favor on Martha’s Vineyard — so many ponds, separated or not from the salty sea water that surrounds this place, seven miles out from the mainland. The map of the Island, displayed on a board outside the Vineyard Haven Steamship Authority building, looks like a moth-eaten triangle whose lacy holes tell the story of many ponds, large and small.
It all seemed like a game to me — the telephone with oversized buttons, the notebooks adorned inside with multicolored dividers and bright cut-out floral images, the cassette recorder and accompanying pile of tapes whose covers illustrated the story, the round reading light with a wide magnified lens, the handheld TV remote with major on/off tabs indicated in real red or green, the super-sized TV screen. I’d never seen such an eye catching array of entertaining devices as those my mother, at age 80 or so, had at her fingertips.
O n Saturday, Feb. 14, we set out in the morning from Chilmark for a shop in town and a Valentine’s Day drive. It was a sunny day though terribly cold and strangely still back in Vineyard Haven on this long winter weekend to mark Presidents’ Day — a great opportunity for Islanders to escape to mainland shops, northern ski slopes, or Bahamian bliss. After a quick grocery shop, my husband Peter and I left town behind and drove past the frozen quiet MV Shipyard, the windswept buildings of the Packer Company, and out along the causeway toward Oak Bluffs.
I’m trying to be thankful, and that should be easy at this time of year. Here I am in Chilmark where I enjoy the legacy left by my parents, Henry and Peggy Scott. That legacy is our family house, facing south on South Road, set between old roadside stone walls, close to an open meadow and looking south toward Chilmark Pond and the sea. Known in the community as the Scott House, my dad had named it Pipe Down, after his days in the U.S. Navy, 1944-45, then stationed on Martha’s Vineyard.