Humidity and warmer temperatures returned for the weekend, after a lovely cool week. I loved having nights cool enough for pulling up a blanket, and looking out the window at the brilliant full moon and star-filled sky. The first day of fall will have passed as you are reading this. Perhaps we will have had a bit of rain, too; it is predicted for Monday and maybe Tuesday morning.
Saturday, Sept. 10, was a perfect blue-sky day for the wedding of Stephen Hammond and Bethany DeBettencourt, and the Magnusons’ Tiasquin Orchard was the perfect setting. The bride arrived in her grandfather’s 1909 Model T Ford, the same car that had delivered her mother, Sue, to her wedding to Will DeBettencourt. A friend of the bride and groom, Dylan Greene, officiated under a flower-decorated arbor. After the ceremony, everyone walked a path leading next door to Rich and Suzanne Hammond’s, Stephen’s parents’ home, where a tent was set up in the back yard for an always sumptuous West Tisbury potluck with raw bar and pig roast and plenty of room for dancing afterward. Stephen’s brothers, Evan and Leigh, were groomsmen. Later, Evan and Shane McGovern provided the music for partygoers, who danced and danced till almost dawn. Bethany and Stephen are living in West Tisbury. I join in wishing them the happiest life together.
Before I continue, my apologies to anyone who sent news to my Comcast email. It isn’t working. I couldn’t open any emails, just got a message to that effect, something I had already figured out on my own. Aargh! Computers.
Children’s librarian Nelia Decker has a special request. Oct. 8 is Fairy and Troll House-Building Day at the library, and building materials are needed. She asks that anything gathered on our walks, such as acorns, shells, stones, bark, twigs, feathers, grasses, moss, small pieces of driftwood, anything natural, be brought to the library to be shared.
Events at the library this week are:
Thursday, Sept. 22, at 6 pm, the Martha’s Vineyard Cultural Council will hold a meeting discussing procedures and application forms for potential grant applicants. The application deadline for the 2017 grant cycle is Monday, Oct. 17.
Monday, Sept. 26, at noon, Love Ablan will lead a discussion called “Eyes Wide Open: Art and Photography as Meditation,” “how visual mediums affect artist and viewer, and how art can be therapeutic to both.” At 7 pm, Dave Kish will present “An Evening of Jazz.”
Tuesday, Sept. 27, come to an artist’s reception at 4 pm for Marsha Winsryg, whose egg tempera paintings will be on display in the Community Room. The exhibition features paintings done between 2005 and 2016. Many are images from Marsha’s travels to Italy, and they include paintings she has never shown before.
Wednesday, Sept. 28, Tweed’s Reads will meet at 7 pm. This month’s theme is “the sharp knife of satire,” exemplified by “Riotous Assembly” by Tom Sharpe. Books are available at the circulation desk.
I am convinced there would be less marital discord if the chainsaw had never been invented. The world seems to be divided into gardeners who never prune anything, artful pruners concerned with the shape of a tree or shrub, and the otherwise perfectly lovely human being and partner who turns into a maniac the second he (or she, to be fair) pulls the starter cord and feels the engine throb into life in his/her hands. It still surprises me the panic I experience, fearing the potential for damage that sound represents.
This Sunday was a perfectly pleasant afternoon. I was painting in my studio. Mike was repairing a window frame that had some rot, and our front-door screen that Nanuk had gone through the day before. Then the chainsaw started up somewhere out in the yard.
I had asked Mike to take some overhanging branches down to give my garden more light and to take out some trees that were too close to specimen trees I had planted. I never asked him to cut off several lower branches of the beautiful Japanese red maple tree in our front yard, the sight in front of me as I raced outside. “They’re in my way when I mow,” was the explanation given. Also “in the way,” I have to assume, were leafy branches of a dogwood tree, leaving the dead branches now bare to all observers. I had asked him to take out some of the oldest parts of the lilac his father gave us when we built our house; every New England house has to have a lilac bush on the corner. Now it has stubs sticking out at dangerous angles, but it’s no longer “too close to the house,” in one person’s opinion. I arrived just in time to have the original two branches shading my garden removed at my request.
I know I have written on this theme before in past years’ columns. They always get lots of comments and laughs. I’m sure it is a universal lament. But these sorts of things seem to come up over and over again, and I am convinced that the chainsaw and the “more power” exhilaration it engenders are totally to blame.