You pull into the driveway after a long day at work, but the story on the radio has you hooked so you stay a little longer to listen. Through the windows, you can see your family unpacking their backpacks or dancing around the kitchen. You know that there’s a pile of laundry to fold in the bedroom and a leaky faucet in the bathroom that still needs fixing. But that’s what makes a home: the constant upkeep of chores, cleaning, and bills swirling around the boisterous dinners, the family portraits on the walls, the dog asleep by the wood stove. A house is a collection of design decisions, fixtures, and finishes, but it’s also much more. So turn off the engine, go inside, and enjoy.
What to Do
Come winter, it can be tempting to stay inside, venturing out only to get to the next warm place. But the Island is a peaceful paradise in the cold months. Bundle up and let the staff of the Martha’s Vineyard Land Bank Commission guide you as you explore it.
The first walk, on November 1, will meander through the Squibnocket Pond Reservation. The next definite plan is a hike from Christiantown Woods Preserve to Arrowhead Farm on April 4. Both are from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Check mvlandbank.com for additional dates, which will be added as they approach.
Where to Shop
There’s your aunt who loves to knit and your father who loves to fish. There’s your coworker who golfs and your boss who bakes. Then there are the ten or twenty other people you’d like to buy a gift for this holiday season. But don’t stress. A visit to the Holiday Gift Show at Featherstone Center for the Arts from November 7 to December 16 should help you cross off at least a few names from your list, all while supporting the local artists and craftspeople who create the gifts your aunt, uncle, dog walker, babysitter, and dentist will love.
What We’re Listening To
Musician Meredith Sheldon does it all. On the Vineyarder’s new album, Once We Were Dust, released this past summer, she blends indie pop and rock sounds with droning reverb. She contributes vocals, baritone guitar, bass, keys, and synthesizer. She’s producing a big sound but speaking right to the listener with confessional lyrics. While her show at the Martha’s Vineyard Playhouse sold out in September, you can find the album on Bandcamp or her website.
What’s Up and What’s Down
Forget about the New York Stock Exchange. We’ll tell you what’s up and what’s down on the Island, what’s rising and what’s falling. Remember: buy low, sell high.
What’s Up
Steamship Authority general manager Alex Kryska, who started his job in January 2026 with a salary of $225,000, received a $26,000 pay raise this summer after getting high marks from the governing board during his first performance review, according to the Vineyard Gazette. Board members addressed Kryska in a meeting: “I’m very confident that you’re the man for the job,” said Martha’s Vineyard representative Ted Gavin. Kryska
now earns $251,513.60 a year and will be eligible for further raises beginning in January 2027.
What’s Down
No one would be surprised to hear it’s not all rosy with the ferry line. This fall, the Steamship Authority removed the M/V Island Home from service for three days after discovering that its ten-year federal radio license had expired. This expiration, which occurred on July 21, 2026, made the boat illegal to operate, the Vineyard Gazette reported.
What to Read
Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage by Belle Burden (The Dial Press, January 2026)
By now, you may be familiar with the story: it was March 2020, the frenzied first weeks of the pandemic, and Belle Burden and her husband decided to quarantine in their house on Martha’s Vineyard. The family unpacked and settled in for a long stay. Then, a week later, Burden’s husband asked for a divorce. Blindsided and mystified, Burden was left with more questions than answers as they separated their lives. Three years later, her essay about the ordeal and its aftermath was published in The New York Times. “To have empty spaces when you try to remember and make sense of your past feels like a form of amnesia,” she wrote. “I have no secret to share about how to move on without answers.”
Burden expanded on her essay and dove into the drama in her book, Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage,which came out earlier this year. The book has spent thirty-five weeks on The New York Times bestseller list. This fall, it won the New England Book Award for nonfiction and shows no signs of slowing down.
Triage: A Novel by Elisa M. Speranza (Burgundy Bend Press, May 2026)
It’s 1951 and Laura Marino has returned home from serving as an Army nurse in World War II, but she can’t escape the memories: “The stench of the dead and dying. The sharp antiseptic tang of alcohol, the metallic smell of blood, the gut-wrenching odor of infected gas gangrene wounds. A boy’s desperate, clammy hand is clutching hers, its grip fierce, missing his family, his limbs, his mind.” Eventually, Laura learns that her closest friend from her time in the war, Frances, has taken her own life. Wracked with grief and guilt, Laura’s life starts to unravel and, while her husband is away, she forms a passionate bond with a wounded veteran who understands her pain.
To research the novel, Speranza, a seasonal Vineyard resident, looked at the diaries of nurses who served in wars, as well as nurses who worked during the Covid-19 pandemic. “I think there is a broader question in Triage about any kind of trauma that goes untreated or unresolved, and the choices people make in coping with that,” she told the MV Times.
Well Said
“I’m on cloud nine right now.”
– Richard Mann was over the moon to be the first to weigh in a fish at the annual Martha’s Vineyard Striped Bass & Bluefish Derby this year. Although his name was only at the top of the leader board for “0.3 seconds,” Mann told the Vineyard Gazette, he was happy to have it there at all. His bluefish may have been bested, but his memory is prize enough.
Did You Know?
If you were to ask a Vineyarder today who Emily Post was, you’d likely get an answer like, “Didn’t she teach people how to set a dinner table?” She did teach where the salad fork went and where to put your napkin, along with lessons on punctuality, manners, and appropriate attire, in her books, including Etiquette: In Society, In Business, In Politics, and At Home (Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1922). But a lesser-known passion was the flower garden at her summer home at 34 Fuller Street in Edgartown.
The author and socialite purchased the house in the fall of 1925 and was such a fastidious gardener that she kept a written account of its plants and their growth from 1927 until her death in 1960. She called it the “Garden Book” and inside were drawings, blueprints, article clippings, and receipts for seeds. She tracked the garden’s weekly progress with color charts and diagrams, even designating the times of day when sunlight fell on certain areas.
A 2010 article in this publication described the garden in detail: “bright yellow hollyhocks, light blue delphiniums, and white platycodon; the picket fence garden held more hollyhocks, foxgloves, lupines, columbines, phlox, gladioluses, and dahlias; the side and back beds were planted with irises, snapdragons, and zinnias.”
Even though Post achieved international renown, it was in Edgartown that she was rejuvenated by her garden and where she did much of her other work.
“It is here I write my daily newspaper syndicated articles during the summer months and store up enough vitality to carry me through a strenuous winter of writing and broadcasting in far-away New York,” Post wrote in a 1933 article in the Vineyard Gazette.
For decades, tourists stopped by to admire Post’s garden. Though the family sold the property in 2001, the garden still thrives to this day.
This article appears in Fall-Winter Home & Garden 2026-2027.