West Tisbury Town Column

We are finally getting some much-needed April showers. Daffodils are blooming all over town. There are tiny green leaves showing on the earliest autumn olive and multiflora rose bushes, the first pale blossoms on magnolias and cherry trees. Don’t forget to watch the new trees that were planted on Brandy Brow and around the town center last year.

I remember having invited Debby Athearn and Betty Haynes over for lunch and to see the daffodils I had planted the previous fall. They were blooming in a pretty ribbon across the front of my rhododendron hedge. We went outside to what I thought would be an admiring perusal, only to hear my friend Debby say, “But they’re all yellow.” This was probably 1986 or ‘87. They are still blooming, and still all yellow. By design, yes; I have different varieties all over the yard after these many years, but it still makes me laugh. I wonder if Betty remembers that day? I know we both miss Deb.

Her brother-in-law, John Athearn, who died on March 21, will be buried at the West Tisbury cemetery this Sunday, April 13, at 1:30. The Rev. Baker will conduct the graveside service. Afterward, we will all go up the road to the Grange Hall for a memorial service and an opportunity to share our stories and memories of Johnny. Morning Glory Farm will provide the food, so not our usual West Tisbury potluck.

“April is the cruelest month,” according to T.S. Eliot. Charles Dickens’ opening lines to “A Tale of Two Cities” went through my mind, as well, but incorrectly, as I was thinking about April, and using the quote for my own purposes. To be accurate, I looked them up. Here they are in complete form:

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way — in short, the period was so far like the present period that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”

“April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain.”

Dickens wrote “A Tale of Two Cities in 1859”; Eliot “The Wasteland” in 1922. I was thinking about how the weather begins to get nice in April. I want to be outside in my yard, not inside working on my taxes. Instead it turned my mind to our current politics, the dichotomy of “on the one hand, on the other hand,” how life and history continue along in patterns that repeat, ad nauseam. I can’t understand why we humans never seem to learn and do better, how the political upheavals of the French Revolution and World War I were not so different from what is rending America in 2025.

By the time you are reading this, town meeting and our town election will be over. Some of us will still be going through our tax forms. It will be Palm Sunday and Passover, the official opening of spring and greenhouses on the island.

Baseball season has begun. The Red Sox are in second place in the AL East. Opening Day at Fenway Park celebrated the 1975 Red Sox team, with Carl Yastrzemski, Dwight Evans, Carlton Fisk, Fred Lynn, Jim Rice, and others marching out onto the field. Yaz threw the first pitch. It was fun to see them all, and to remember when your team was your team forever, when hopes rose and fell as the season progressed. Go Sox!

If you have any West Tisbury Town Column suggestions, email Hermine Hull, hermine.hull@gmail.com.