As you may have noticed, we rearranged some of the furniture on the cover of this magazine. If you didn’t notice, it might be time for you to consider moving your La-Z-Boy to another corner of your living room and putting that hand-painted “Life is better at the beach” pastel plank where the stencilled “Licensed to chill” sign currently hangs. Then you could put your “Licensed to chill” sign where the driftwood that reads “Heaven is a little closer in a house by the water” is, and put that one where the “You can shake the sand from your feet but it never leaves your soul” sign currently hangs. That last one can go back where the first one was.
Trust us, it’s going to change your whole outlook. It will be like having a brand-new house on Martha’s Vineyard, only one with all the old barefoot memories still intact.
And so it is with magazines. I could just say of the new look, “Hey, it’s been a long, gray winter without enough snow to play in,” and leave it at that. It wouldn’t be all that far from the truth. My son has a job in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, at a company that allows its staff to “take the powder clause” and ski all morning if a certain amount of snow falls overnight. That sounds pretty good, right? Okay, I suppose some of us already take the “striper clause” when the Derby is in play. And carpenters are famous for taking the “swell clause” when the waves are clean and chest-high at the rock pile. An unnamed member of our team here takes the “deer clause” for most of November.
About the time we put out this Spring-Summer issue of Martha’s Vineyard Home & Garden, however, we were kind of running out of clauses: the “damp gray not too cold but not warm outside either and pitch-black by 4:30 clause”? Doesn’t have much ring to it.
I could also say that we redesigned the magazine to make the word “home” much bigger and “garden” much smaller because all over the Island the houses seem to be getting bigger and the lawns and gardens smaller. And not just in Edgartown, where for years now houses have slowly but surely been metastasizing into every square inch of their lots. Buildings are bulging in Vineyard Haven and Oak Bluffs. Don’t worry, though, this is not where I launch into a predictable screed about excess and vainglory: there are plenty of semiprofessionals on the Island who can handle that.
The truth is simple. A few years ago we redesigned the Home & Garden issues because we worried that some readers were confused about the relationship between our five “regular” (read: “extraordinary”) issues of Martha’s Vineyard Magazine and the two Home & Garden issues. (To say nothing of our two Island Weddings issues and our Real Estate Yearbook and the Island Guide....)
I won’t go into what it used to look like, but that change a few years ago was sosuccessful that this winter we decided, now that no one on-Island or off- is confused about the relationship between the various magazines we publish, it would be a good idea to change it all up again. Nothing lasts forever, not even feng shui.
Yup. Stay tuned. There’s more to come.
