It is a singular variety of good fortune to dwell in one place that you love for many years. To watch the mail-order twigs you and your best friend planted grow into mature creatures. For that is what plants are – creatures – when you live with them for ten or twenty years. Or more. If you don’t believe it, you have not cohabited with a wisteria.

It is different with a tree. Sure, you can plant an ornamental cherry and it will grow fast and surprise you with its girth and canopy in the time that it takes for you to go from waving to your four-year-old child who is crying on the beach because you are paddling off in a small boat without him to the time that he has gone off to university and you are the one on the empty fall beach holding back your emotions. But that same amount of time is nothing at all to an oak or a copper beech. Those fellows don’t think the way you and I do. It takes a tree like that fifteen years just to make a decision about a third-level underperforming limb, and then another five or ten years to kill it and drop it on your lawn.

Imagine if humans lived long enough to say, “I don’t think I really need that arm anymore and it’s costing me two hamburgers and a peach every week to keep it fired up and working. I think I’ll just ignore it from now on and it will eventually fall off.”
I guess we used to do that with teeth, but an arm?

For us, it is more often the things we have picked up and carried around in our arms that eventually we decide to drop. Some people are quicker at it than others: like day lilies, they dispose of even the most beautiful of blossoms the moment their usefulness is past. Others, oak-like, may become sentimentally attached to a wheelbarrow that is so rusted out it will barely carry a trowel, let alone a bag of composted manure. Shovels in need of new handles, chairs to fix, broken fishing reels: these are the dead limbs that have not quite fallen, but surely will when at last the right moment comes.

One of the great pleasures of a new home may be accumulating the things to fill it with and make it your own. One of the joys of living in a place seemingly for your entire adult life is the intermittent letting go.

Or not, if you’re not in the mood yet. With apologies to Thoreau, I say, “Simplify? Schmimplify!” Other than watching the trees grow and agreeing to disagree with the wisteria, the best thing about living in one place forever is probably gathering moss and growing lichen. If you’re not moving, why should your stuff?

This article appears in Fall Home & Garden 2015.

Fall is a sort of second summer. One with shorter days, it’s true, and cooler evenings. But the water in the ocean and in the Sounds is warmer than in July. The local produce so beloved in August is, if anything, more plentiful, as are most of the fishes. There are not just bass and blues now, but blistering explosions of false albacore and – could it be? – bonito. There is a fair chance in September and October of clean waves sent our way by distant (one hopes) hurricanes, and the beach guards at the usual access spots have gone back to school. Most of the migratory automobiles have returned to their off-Island roosts, leaving only the resident population.

There is always a certain amount of good-natured talk among the year-round crowd about “getting our Island back from the summer people,” talk which is not so much the product of any kind of real antipathy toward the crowds of July and August as it is of relief after a season of labor. Summer is when the year-round crowd works the hardest, often making most of their living, sometimes not even living in their own homes, which they have rented out for additional income. Summer for most year-round folk isn’t summer at all, in fact – fall is.
Summer people and year-rounders are often the only groups you hear about. But there are also fall people. You see them on the ferry in sweaters, down for a long weekend at an inn or a bed and breakfast. Or they are staying at an old family place that they and their various cousins and siblings rent out for July and August to pay the bills. It’s a load of buddies with rods galore on the roof, come to win the bass and bluefish derby. Or college lovers on a lark and a credit card.

Some fall people are actually the three-season types you never really manage to see during the summer crush, because, no doubt, they are too sensible to traipse from party to party talking of how the kids have grown up and the joints have grown old and the world has gone mad. They spend August instead at the very far end of the beach, where they reliably arrive late in the afternoon and stay until shooting stars begin to fall.

One of the unexpected benefits of living in a place where so many of the people you run into are on vacation is that you get to know the side of them that comes out when they are at rest or play. Whatever demons and burdens they carry around with them off-Island, they are generally trying their best to ignore or forget. And often they are succeeding to a remarkable degree. People on the Island are usually with the people they want to be with, doing the things they enjoy, eating the foods they crave.  

Sure, there are some who play too hard, or who can’t really leave whatever it is they were leaving behind back there, or who can’t understand why some people (their year-round friends) have work to do. But you don’t find so many of those in September or October. Generally speaking, if a person has figured out how to organize life to be here after Labor Day, he or she must be doing something entirely right.

It’s all about fall.

Winter? Never heard of it.

When I heard recently that the Discovery Channel is coming to the West Tisbury Dumptique to shoot a series about the famous giant sword maker of Martha’s Vineyard, I was filled with remorse and fear on multiple levels. What if those worn-in, but not worn-out Spanish boots of Spanish leather I left there not long ago get discovered and are worth a fortune? What if I forget about the filming and drive by in the background with my pickup truck  embarrassingly full of recycling? It’s true, I don’t take that stuff down there until the garage is literally overflowing, and then it looks as if I run some kind of off-the-books catering business. And of course, why have I been dawdling so long about assigning a story for the magazine on the giant sword maker of West Tisbury when writers have been pitching him to me for months, sending me links to his viral video and asking if I know the guy? Scooped in our backyard by the Discovery Channel! Couldn’t it have been 60 Minutes?

My foremost regret may be that I long ago fought to limit my son’s adolescent interest in World of Warcraft, possibly denying him the opportunity to discover whether he, too, might have a secret gift for crafting absurdly giant blades. I’m no orc, at least not most nights, but the swords are weirdly beautiful and their creator appears on his YouTube videos to be well balanced and happy. Sure, he’s a bit crazy when running across his backyard and chopping a summer squash asunder with a cleaver the size of a Camp Ground cottage. But otherwise he seems a typical, jolly, hirsute up-Island artisan whose métier just happens to be medieval. It’s definitely not wampum and it isn’t beach plum jelly, but whether it is authentic Vineyard style, who am I to say?

You hear it all the time: this or that house isn’t just “un-Vineyardy” it’s downright WRONG. Or it’s “so Hamptons,” “so suburban,” “too L.A.,” “kind of Florida.” And when did Oak Bluffs start needing advice from a Dennis town planner about how to find its unique inner identity…okay, that’s another story. (But really, Dennis?) Like the complaints you hear about tourists who drive way too fast except when they are driving way too slow, the definition of true Island style depends largely on which Island universe you inhabit.

Which is not to say that there is no such thing as poor judgment or dubious taste. There surely is, in small houses and large. “Just too much” is a criticism that sticks, whether applied to affordable lawn ornaments or custom-built marble-encrusted square footage. Suffice it to say that absurdly big may be artistic and amusing in handmade swords, but it’s always just boring in real estate.

There’s a story about Andy Warhol, who as far as I know never visited the Island, but did go with his entourage in the 1970s to the famously over-the-top Castle Neuschwanstein in Bavaria. He was at the height of his fame, and they let him sit in the golden throne of the supposedly mad and definitely house-proud King Ludwig II.

“What do you think?” someone asked the artist.

Warhol shivered in the vast hall and looked around.

“I’d rather have heat,” he said, “than money.”