My friend Ed called recently to say he is looking for a house to rent on the Vineyard for a few weeks this summer. These calls from off-Island are one of the surest signs of spring, as reliable as the pinkletinks that crawl up out of their cold, muddy beds and into the trees to start their nightly peep-peep-peeping for love and happiness. In the spirit of the season, everyone is hopeful, looking for the secret unknown hideaway with water access and enough bedrooms to maybe invite some friends up. The one that the owners don’t know is rentable for two to three times what the caller wants to pay would be ideal. The one with no realtor involved. In August.
Other signs of spring are calls from on-Island friends whose winter rentals won’t be available through the summer after all. Well-paying year-round jobs aren’t enough to think of owning a home on the Island, it turns out, so they’re wondering about that summer tepee that used to be out behind so-and-so’s house. Calls come too from homeowners who may move out for a few weeks and rent their homes to strangers for enough cash to cover six months of their mortgage. “Have you ever done it?” they ask. “Is it worth it?”
There is a fourth kind of call, of course. The one from a neighbor saying that at long last the time has come to sell. The house has simply become too valuable, the taxes too high, the Island too expensive, so why not cash out? Now that grandma has passed away, some explain, the various cousins simply can’t figure out how to make it work. So it is that Ed came to be looking for a new rental. For several summers his family rented a funky late-1960s modern spread up-Island. It was the kind of place with rusty water, original appliances, and notes written in sharpie all over the place, sometimes directly onto the walls. “Be sure to empty the lint catch in the dryer or YOU WILL BURN DOWN THE HOUSE.” “After you RINSE YOUR FEET make sure hose is completely off OR YOU WILL DRAIN THE WELL…”
It was the kind of place, in other words, with a location irresistible to those who want to build a waterfront home on Martha’s Vineyard, and a house that few people who could afford to build a waterfront home on Martha’s Vineyard these days would care to rent.
So it sold, which was perhaps an inevitable outcome once the family that owned it for the past half century decided they needed to rent it out. Now it will almost certainly be torn down, which may or may not be an architectural loss. The new owners, who also have come to the Island for years, will love it. Change is inevitable and sometimes good, and in any case earns the rent and mortgage money for more than a few year-round realtors and builders. This is true even if it also leaves my friend Ed back in the business of making springtime calls to the Vineyard from the top of his tree somewhere off-Island.
Still, it serves us all well not to bury our heads in the mud but to pay attention, lest the change be relentlessly in one direction. For whatever song you find yourself singing, and however it is you first became lucky enough to discover the Island, the chorus is almost always the same: a home, and maybe even a garden, on Martha’s Vineyard.
On another note, we are thrilled to welcome Vanessa Czarnecki on board as senior editor. As the former news editor and director of digital content at our sister publication, the Vineyard Gazette, and the former managing editor of The Boston Phoenix, she brings to the job an invaluable combination of talent, local knowledge, and experience.
