Some people prefer the fireworks, the Agricultural Fair, or a sun-scorched, physically punishing day riding the surf at South Beach. I like the Perseid meteor shower. Each year it puts on a show for several weeks and peaks around the middle of the month. 

As August rituals go, it’s less lauded but spectacular. There’s nothing uniquely Vineyard about it, though it does exemplify what I love best about this place. On a clear night when the bars and ice cream shops are packed and the line for doughnuts serpentines around the parking lot, I head to an empty up-Island beach or an abandoned pier – any place where the light pollution is limited and the katydids and bullfrogs are loud. I lie back and look up. When conditions have been ideal, I have spotted thirty meteors shooting across the sky in an hour. 

I assign each one a wish, as Jiminy Cricket instructed. I wish for the health of a loved one whose papery hands now shake. I plead for the future of the baby asleep on my chest. I send up a request for stability, sagacity, and peaceable kings, and for the ability to let our guards down for just a moment to savor the pleasures of sweet, sticky August. I count my blessings and count the stars, and I wish for more nights like this, when all is bright and hopeful and wild. 

Speaking of counted blessings: this is my first issue back at work since the birth of my daughter in January. Hearty thanks go to the fantastic magazine crew, and acting editor Nicole Fullin in particular, who produced three excellent issues while I was out. Thanks, too, to the Massachusetts lawmakers who in 2021 instituted partially paid family leave. Only thirteen states and Washington, D.C., have established mandatory paid leave policies across the country. We can and we must do better. I hope fervently – and willfully naively – that we will soon see meaningful change.