And who ever said the world was fair,” my mother used to ask my sisters and me whenever one of us would cry about the unfairness of things either particular or general. This was back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the nation’s wealth was distributed a little more evenly among the white male population. On almost every other front, however, opportunity was distributed even less fairly than it is today, which is saying something. 

We weren’t crying about wealth or opportunity, of course, unless you call eating the last brownie “wealth,” or getting to sit in the front seat “opportunity.” And it was useless to argue with Mom once she had asked her rhetorical question, which wasn’t a question at all but a command to cease and desist litigating the current lump that life had presented. Sometimes she didn’t even pose it as a question, but simply announced, “No one ever said the world was fair.” It came out almost automatically, which makes me think she probably heard it from her own mother.

Never mind that Mom’s willingness to accept the wrongs of the world as immutable seemed to apply only to her children. The bigger world of injustice was her lifelong foe, and more than once when we were arguing about who was going to get to sit in the front seat, we were running late on our way from church to the peace vigil in the center of Amherst, Massachusetts. “This is the longest-running peace vigil in the history of America,” she would tell us proudly. It probably still is. Mom’s activism moved on to other causes in the 1980s, but the peace vigil was still there one Sunday last year when my sisters and I returned to town to bury her.

Now America’s Longest War is at last over. Some of us were surfing at Squibnocket on that perfectly golden September morning when it all began, and as the rumors of planes crashing into buildings filtered out to the lineup, there was nothing to do, it seemed, but stay put, rising and falling with the clean groundswell as though time had stopped. We didn’t want to go home and hear more. Eventually we did because we had homes to go to. And people who were waiting for us.

But how many people all over the world did not come home again in those twenty long years, including my smiling friend David Rivers, who grew up here on the Vineyard and who died on 9/11? How many people at home waited in vain? Today, to me, twenty years seems like only yesterday.

The long war is over, but I’m sure the happy few who still gather at the common back in my old hometown know better than to pack up their signs and their longing for a better world. As they could have told you back when Saigon fell and that previous “longest war” ended, the absence of conflict is a good thing, but it is not the same thing as peace. 

As for the fairness of the world and of mothers, I’ve come to think that Mom’s point was not so much “shut up and put up, son.” It was more like “quit counting your brownies, boy, and fasten your seat belt. There is still time to change the world!” Rest in peace, Mom. And be sure to give my love to Dad.                                                                                          

This article appears in Fall Home & Garden 2021.

One doesn’t have to live on an island to have been horrified by the recent devastation of the Abaco Islands and Grand Bahama by Hurricane Dorian. Just as one needn’t live beside a river to react to scenes this past spring of epic flooding on the Mississippi, or in a western forest to sense the horror of a wildfire at the door. After all, in this video-saturated world of ours, the problem isn’t that we won’t comprehend the magnitude of distant traumas, but that we will swipe past the disaster of the day out of exhaustion, boredom, or to find that hilarious cat video everyone is talking about.

And yet there was something particularly wrenching about watching from the Vineyard as Dorian parked itself over the Abacos, a group of islands with roughly the same number of souls – 17,000 – as our year-round population. Add the much larger population of the equally devastated Grand Bahama and the number is closer to the range of our summer population. Anyone who has lived here on the Vineyard through the seasons has seen days when the boats cannot run, planes cannot fly, the electricity flickers or goes out, limbs or even whole trees fall, Five Corners is underwater, and maybe the parking lot at Derby headquarters in Edgartown is too. Those are watchful days when the Island really feels momentarily cut off from the rest of the world. Most of us, I think, secretly love a good storm.

But a Dorian, with hundreds dead and thousands missing? That could never happen here to people like us, we tell ourselves, and not without reason. We are farther out of the traditional path of hurricanes. We have higher ground, stronger houses, a more powerful government. Never mind that around the world an estimated twenty-two million people are expected to be displaced by extreme weather events in 2019, a “low estimate” according to The New York Times that will nevertheless be a record breaker. And never mind that both climate science and history, as reported in previous issues of this magazine and elsewhere, makes clear that a mega-hurricane could very well rake the region. Science, as we know, is out of favor in policy making.

And besides, should a storm hit, we have far more money to spend on a quick cleanup and return to business than do the Bahamians.

So it isn’t so much because we looked at the Abacos and Grand Bahama and saw a vision of our own fragile Island’s future that the spectacle of Dorian’s destruction so resonated here. I suspect it has more to do with the idea we harbor that living on a reasonably small island confers a certain bond of universal kinship to other island dwellers everywhere. “Oh,” we say when visiting other places that are unconnected to a continent, “back home we live on an island too. We have to take a boat there.”

There is doubtless some grain of truth to the sentiment, just as desert dwellers in Arizona may have some discernible degree of kinship with Bedouins, and Iowa corn farmers may share a keen weather eye with traditional Maya gardeners. But it’s hard to imagine the sentiment flowing as strongly the other way, from the ruined Abacos to tidy Martha’s Vineyard. What the Abaconians felt as Dorian destroyed their homes and gardens, I imagine, is utterly and completely alone.

The recent news that our illustrious leader and his brain trust of deep (pocketed) thinkers intend to roll back the regulations on the emission of heat-trapping methane into the atmosphere we all share no doubt has you thinking about the parable of the archaea. What? You don’t remember it? It goes like this:

A long time ago a mighty species, mightier than all the others, came to dominate the planet in a way no species ever has before or since….

No, that’s not right. It wasn’t a long time ago. It was a long, long, long, long time ago. Before skunks, even. Before the Flying Horses. Before the Vineyard Gazette. Before sharks the size of school buses dropped their palm-sized teeth in the clays of the Gay Head Cliffs. All that glacial ho-hum about when the Island became an island five to ten thousand years ago? Forget it. We are talking about a time before the Atlantic Ocean itself was a tiny tidal creek separating what would eventually become Africa from what would become the Great Republic of the United States of America. And, of course, before that same America recently became so great again.

Come with us now back to the dimmest past, two to four billion years ago, when the atmosphere of planet earth was not the thin blue band of oxygen and nitrogen with traces of carbon dioxide, methane, and other gases that it is today. Then, from outer space, the now blue planet looked redder than Mars; the atmosphere was rich in carbon dioxide and methane and almost devoid of oxygen. It was in this environment that the archaea, primitive forms of bacteria, ruled. None more so than the cyanobacteria, which for a billion years went forth and multiplied, covering the earth in a booming economy of photosynthesis, taking in carbon dioxide and giving off oxygen. It was a fine time to be slime. The place was rolling in green.

But it couldn’t last. The slime of the earth carried on being ever slimier despite the fact that its very success as a species was changing the atmosphere. By about 2.4 billion years ago, oxygen in the atmosphere had increased to about 10 percent and was continuing to rise. Some of the oxygen was forming ozone and blocking ultraviolet light from reaching the surface of the planet. Some of it was converting the super heat-trapping methane into the less heat-trapping carbon dioxide.

This was disastrous news for almost all the other living things on the planet. Most of them required the old atmosphere and perished, though a few, known as extremophiles, survived by retreating to deep methane vents at the bottom of the sea. As things would happen, it was not entirely catastrophic for the cyanobacteria that had caused the change. No, the slime, also known as blue-green algae, is still around, toxically blooming occasionally when supposedly more intelligent species stop paying attention to things such as nutrient levels in great ponds and swamps of all stripes. But other than occasional unappetizing bursts of sliminess, the cyano crowd has long since lost its position of global dominance.

What does any of this have to do with the Fall Home & Garden issue of Martha’s Vineyard Magazine, you ask? Precisely everything. Our home atmosphere is in the process of being transformed. The consequences are all around us for anyone to see.  Our own species continues for now to increase, but thousands of others around the planet are already in retreat.

But, you ask, haven’t we evolved?

Of course we have. Unlike cyanobacteria we can take comfort in complaining about our illustrious leaders and their brain trusts of deep (pocketed) thinkers in the swamp we call Washington. Whereas the slime has only itself to blame.

A year ago this fall and again in the spring, I did a lot of new planting around my yard. Smartly, I was assiduous about keeping tags so I’d later be able to identify the new growings and know what should be fed, watered, and pruned when. But now all of those tags are piled in my shed, some still attached to the buckets the plants came in. My oops is a good segue to what’s great about the off-season on the Island: It’s planning time.

This Design Issue of the magazine is timed for when people tend to organize their home projects, head to the bookstore or library to do some research, and look for overall inspiration. Recent years have seen a surge in design services, so here are some wows and motivation to get you going. Whether you see an idea that will work for you or feel an affinity for a certain aesthetic or designer, this is also the perfect time to meet with an Island professional about making your dreams a reality.

Our centerpiece architectural feature introduces a pair of siblings who turned to Hutker Architects in Vineyard Haven to design their houses on family land in Chilmark (page 24). For a designer insider, meet Liz Stiving-Nichols, who brings a calm, neutral palette to many homes (page 40). You’ll also find ideas for adding distinctive elements such as a chandelier (page 36), a painting (page 54), or an artfully plated meal (page 62).

If you’re ready to up the design ante on your property pronto, check out our recommendations for plantings that look especially beautiful in winter (page 46). But don’t forget to keep track of what you plant where – the extra effort is well worth it!

Fall and winter are when I like to hunker down in the kitchen. I love baking and making soups, and I’m intrigued by new – and useful – kitchen gadgets.

My number-one can’t-live-without-it item is a pastry blender (for cutting butter into flour to make my favorite coffee cake). But my most exciting find came only last year: a julienne peeler. I went to a cooking demo and book signing by cookbook author Susie Middleton at Bunch of Grapes Bookstore in Vineyard Haven, and she literally wowed the crowd by making spaghetti out of a squash. Straightaway I went down the street to LeRoux at Home and bought a cheery lime green one.

In our interview with the owners of LeRoux (page 60), we asked about their favorite kitchen tools. I’d heard of a Microplane zester/grater but didn’t know what it was. I often end up cutting myself while zesting a lemon with my metal box grater, which is also difficult to clean. Looks like that zester is next in my lineup of kitchen toys.

We don’t neglect the outdoors in this issue either – the same Susie Middleton reflects on garden tools (page 80), and Island experts weigh in on planting native wildflowers (page 32), enhancing soil with manure (page 10), and putting a flower garden to bed for the winter (page 18).

We take a look at how Nochi, the Vineyard Haven boutique that oozes casual elegance for the home, has been a training ground for a young interior designer (page 48).

You can also read about the transformation of the longtime family home of the late Bill Smith of clambake-catering fame (page 20). Betcha his favorite kitchen gadget was a lobster cracker, but who knows what he might have done with a julienne peeler?

If I had a really big house, I’d want to have an orangery, a magnificent hothouse for citrus trees and exotic plants. My husband and I have talked about it. We’d also like a wood-paneled library with an enormous fireplace, deep leather chairs, a wet bar, and an IMAX screen. Of course, it would be an eco-friendly marvel of a house, with myriad green technology, but it would be huge – so big that we could have a private Metallica concert at one end without disturbing the sleeping cats at the other. And we would.

Alas, our careers in journalism and environmental policy are financially better suited to our modest home. But one can always dream.

Speaking of dream houses: In this edition, we look inside builder Peter Rosbeck Jr.’s new home on Sengekontacket Pond in Edgartown (page 46), and we examine the controversial proliferation of very large houses on Martha’s Vineyard (page 56). We also check out how other industry types shape their own spaces, visiting builder Jim LeRoux’s West Tisbury post-and-beam construction (page 20) and architect Darren Petrucci’s unique Vineyard Haven retreat (page 28).

In the plant world, the pros at the Polly Hill Arboretum continue to learn and evolve (page 36), and gardeners create window boxes for every season (page 72).

We also stop by the workshop of blacksmith Whit Hanschka. Full disclosure: The article was reported last year, before his wife, Nancy Tutko, became the magazine’s associate editor. Potential for nepotism aside, we know readers will be awed by his creativity and workmanship. I wonder if he’d like to make something for our dreamy orangery.