Town Column : Chilmark
By Jacqueline Sexton
Published: February 12, 2009
February is tricking us. After chugging in like winter-as-usual, on Sunday it suddenly turned into early spring with temperatures in the 50s. Chilmark was awash in puddles of melting ice. Maybe it's time to start looking for daffodils.
The library is trying something new this year and will celebrate Valentine's Day all day long on Saturday, the 14th. The Friends of the Library are sponsoring a valentine-making workshop and will treat us to hot chocolate and other delicacies. If you feel creative, bring your ideas; the library has the supplies. Call 508-645-3360 for details.
Library director Ebba Hierta emails us that Susan Johnson of West Tisbury has joined the Chilmark library's staff and will work on specific projects during the winter and as a substitute at the circulation desk. She is a Martha's Vineyard Regional High School graduate and has a master's degree in fine arts from Pratt Institute. She worked for 10 years at an Internet bookstore in Vineyard Haven that specializes in discontinued computer and technical titles. She will help with the library's new website and will create digital archives of historic records. Welcome to Chilmark, Susan.
Check out the church's spiffy new website being designed by Heather Goff: chilmarrkchurch.org.
Our resident astrologer, Arlan Wise, who has traveled in India so often she must know it as well as she knows Chilmark, has returned from a three-week trip with a group of other astrologers to the southeast corner of the country. They visited the nine Navagraha temples, which are associated with the planets and are seen as deities. The group spent the first week in Pondicherry, the old French coastal city where they saw a utopian community, later traveling inland where there were sari factories, a factory that creates bronze statues, and a library that houses old astrology manuscripts. "It was hot, it was intense, and we entered sanctums where no foreigners are allowed since we were considered serious astrologists," she says. "It was a terrific trip, and I can't wait to go back."
Susanna Sturgis will discuss her new book, "The Mud of the Place," at the library next Wednesday, Feb. 18, at 5:30 pm. Ms. Sturgis, a former long-time editor of The Martha's Vineyard Times Calendar section, calls herself a "born and bred New Englander raised on maple syrup." She has lived on Martha's Vineyard since the early 1980s. Her book is an insider's glimpse of off-season Island life - an unsolved shooting, and an unexplained fire that changed the lives of a number of people forever. Books will be available for signing.
Assistant librarian Kristin Maloney has started a new group at the library for teenagers on Saturdays at 3 pm. Call the library for details.
