From the Seasonally Occupied Territories . . .

Surprised, as Usual

Posted on May 12, 2016 by Susanna J. Sturgis

Spring has been off and on, back and forth, this year, which isn’t all that unusual though everybody thinks it is.

20160509 closeup What is somewhat unusual is that when I didn’t see the shadbush blooming in the woods at the end of April, I didn’t assume I’d missed them. I assumed they were late.

As usual I was wrong. They were right on time.

The blooming of the shadbush is sign that spring is really here. It’s named for the shad, which are said to start running at the same time. Shad is a subspecies of herring. A neighbor up the road pointed out that we don’t have shad on Martha’s Vineyard, but “herring bush” sounds too fishy to me. Besides, I call them “ghost trees” for the way the blossoms seem to float deep in the woods, suspended in the air.

20160509 shad 1 Every year I try to take a photo that conveys what my eyes see, and every year I fail. My photography skills and my little point-and-shoot aren’t up to it. But I keep trying. I’m much, much more competent with words than I am with a camera, but I often can’t get the words to say exactly what I mean either.

My hiking companion tolerates — up to a point — my frequent stops to pull my camera from my hip pocket and try one more time. He takes the opportunity to nose in the leaves and inspect the trees for news of whatever’s passed this way since yesterday.

Travvy says “Enough is enough. Come on already.”

In West Tisbury the ghost trees bloom when the oak leaves are just budding and brambles and pine are the only obvious green in the woods. When I passed through Vineyard Haven late yesterday afternoon, the oaks along State Road were almost fully leafed out. Spring arrives down-island before it comes to my town. This is true every year, and every year I’m surprised by the difference a few miles make.

In last year’s blog about the ghost flowers I noted that the late Dionis Coffin Riggs, poet and perceptive observer of the natural world, gave May 10 as the date for the shadbush blooming. As usual, she was right on target.

At the end of that post I wrote: “Now that ‘May 10’ is imprinted in my non-digital memory, I’m going to stop expecting the ghost trees at the end of April.”

As usual I was wrong.

Off Old Courthouse Road, May 2015

Posted in outdoors | Tagged spring, Travvy, West Tisbury | 9 Comments

Spring on the Line, 2016

Posted on May 2, 2016 by Susanna J. Sturgis

This time of year, if you ask a Vineyarder to list the months in order, they’re likely to start off “January, February, March, March, March, June . . .”

In the fall it goes “. . . September, October, November, November, November . . .”

This might give one the impression that the four Vineyard seasons are winter, March, summer, November, but this is not true. It’s actually July and August that seem to go on forever, but that’s not true either.

What’s true is that the months segue into each other and each season steps forward and back, forward and back, before it settles in, and no sooner does it seem settled in for good that the next season steps forward and the dance continues.

I do my laundry at the Airport Laundromat roughly every three weeks then hang it out on the line at home. (Why three weeks? Because that’s when I run out of clean underwear.) This is how I chart the changing of the seasons. People have been bitching more than usual this year about spring’s slow arrival, but the laundry line says that spring is pretty much on schedule.

Mitts on left, hat on right

The wash I did last Thursday included not only the last of the winter’s longjohns but also the fuzzy cap and fleece smoker’s mitts that I haven’t worn in several weeks.

It also included two long-sleeved T-shirts and, get this, the first short-sleeved T of the season. This particular T is the newest addition to the out-of-control T-shirt collection that I keep swearing I’m not going to add to. I acquired this one with a donation to Raise Hell!, a documentary that’s being made about the late, great journalist Molly Ivins. More about Molly and the film here. Since the T-shirt arrived in November November November, this was the first time I’d worn it.

20160428 molly shirt Here’s the Molly T-shirt right side up. This looks a little weird because the wind has to be blowing a lot harder than it was to make shirts stand straight up on the line, and if it were blowing that hard, I wouldn’t be doing laundry.

Last Thursday was a perfect drying day. It was sunny all morning, and there was just enough breeze to keep the laundry moving, but not enough to blow socks and undies off the drying rack on my deck. By the time the clouds started rolling in around 2 in the afternoon, everything was dry and ready to bring in.

Here’s almost the whole line. Molly and a pair of jeans are out of sight on the right. Three more pairs of jeans are out of sight on the left. Note that there are only three pairs of longjohns, and no sweaters. Spring really is here.

20160428 whole line

Posted in home | Tagged laundry, Molly Ivins, spring, T-shirts | 8 Comments

April License Plate Report

Posted on May 2, 2016 by Susanna J. Sturgis

201604 april license map

Not a big haul in April, but Indiana and Kentucky have been added to the map.

License plate spotting was, well, spotty in the first half of the month, so when I went to vote in the town election at mid-month, it was a minor thrill to find myself face to face with Panama outside the emergency services building where West Tisbury casts its ballots.

No, the car wasn’t registered in Panama and it hadn’t come here from there. Some while back — at least two decades if my memory can be trusted — passenger vehicles were only issued one number plate, to be affixed to the back end of the car. This left the front plate holder free for the owner’s self-expression. This can include plates with artistic designs or pithy slogans, or bygone plates from other jurisdictions. I vaguely remember seeing Aruba once on a Vineyard road.

For at least two decades, new plates have been issued in pairs, one to be affixed to the back of the car, the other to the front. Owners who want to express themselves are limited to bumper stickers and magnets and, for the ambitious, custom paint jobs. There are still quite a few single-plate cars on the road, however. The plates have outlasted the cars they were originally attached to, but the registration can keep being transferred as long as the plates hold up.

These plates, by the way, either have six numbers or three numbers followed by three letters. The numbers and letters are green, not red. If the three-letter sequence begins with X, Y, or Z, the numbers and letters are red and the plates come in pairs. They also say “Spirit of America” at the bottom. More than you ever needed to know, right?

In any case, it’s the plate on the back of the vehicle that counts, so I don’t have to make room on the map for Panama.

Posted in license plates | Tagged license plates | 4 Comments

Happy 90th, Shirley!

Posted on April 27, 2016 by Susanna J. Sturgis

Today my friend Shirley Mayhew turns 90. If I don’t finish this post PDQ, I’ll have to say yesterday.

I’ve met many, many amazing women in my life, but Shirley is near the top of the list. Shirley moved to Martha’s Vineyard, the young bride of island native John Mayhew, in 1947. That’s the year my parents got married. I was born four years later. I didn’t lay eyes on Martha’s Vineyard till 1965. I didn’t move here (for a year, just for a year) till 20 years after that.

If anyone calls Shirley a wash-ashore, I might have to take up dueling.

For the last several years Shirley and I have both been in Cynthia Riggs’s Sunday night writers group. This is how I first heard most of the essays in Shirley’s wonderful collection Looking Back: My Long Life on Martha’s Vineyard (2014).

If you’ve any interest in recent or not-so-recent Vineyard history, you need this book.

Shirley notes that 40 years passed between the publication of her first book, Seasons of a Vineyard Pond, and the publication of her second. It will most emphatically not be 40 years between the publication of the second and third. Her third, a children’s book about the day the circus came to Martha’s Vineyard (in 1963), is in the works. She’s collecting essays for a fourth, about her adventures in a small Andean village in the 1980s.

Meanwhile she contributes regularly to Martha’s Vineyard Magazine, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Martha’s Vineyard Times. She has also made several contributions to this blog: “The Musicales: Then and Now,” “Community,” and “A Miracle.”

When you’ve got someone who’s that observant, has been around that long, and writes that well, you’ve got a treasure on your hands.

Plus Shirley is just plain cool. I’m glad to know her, and I’m glad she knows me, and if I ever grow up, I hope I get to be like her.

Happy birthday, Shirley.

Shirley (left), Nancy Aronie, and Arlene Bodge at Cynthia Riggs’s bridal shower, February 2013

Posted in Martha's Vineyard, writing | Tagged history, Shirley Mayhew, West Tisbury, year-rounders | 5 Comments

March License Plate Report

Posted on April 1, 2016 by Susanna J. Sturgis

The best March ever in my license plate game has made up for the worst January ever. Twelve new sightings in March! Today, the year-to-date total stands at 27, one ahead of a year ago’s tally and exactly the same as the year’s before that.

Spotted in March were, in order, Florida, Pennsylvania, Idaho, Delaware, Georgia, South Carolina, Wisconsin, Maryland, Colorado, Michigan, Washington, and Ohio. I’ve actually seen a second Delaware, which is usually the most elusive of the East Coast states, and I must have missed a few Marylands before March, because Maryland never really goes away.

201603 mar license map

Posted in license plates | Tagged license plates | 6 Comments

Spring Snow

Posted on March 26, 2016 by Susanna J. Sturgis

March didn’t come in like a lion this year. This year March came in like an unobtrusive house guest who never gets underfoot and maybe even helps out in the kitchen. Once she got comfortable, she threw her weight around a bit, but the equinox was approaching, the days were getting longer, and the clocks “sprang forward,” causing the usual dislocation. I’m still waking up later than I like, but Travvy wasn’t begging me for supper an hour early the way he does with “fall back.’

Then word went round that a snowstorm was due to arrive the same weekend as spring. This threw Facebook into a tizzy, of course, and was even good for some eye rolling at the post office, where people are a good deal less excitable than they are on social media. “Eight inches!” the initial reports predicted. The forecast accumulation slipped steadily downward. When the storm arrived, it brought mostly rain. The snow totaled maybe two inches at most and was nearly gone in 24 hours, but it was pretty while it lasted.

Mid-March was warm enough that I brought two chairs up from down below and actually spent some time sitting out on the deck. Not this day, however.

The slush in Trav’s outside water dish didn’t coalesce into a disk, but I did don my boots with the Yaktrax on. Last spring I had an ice disk on April 21, so I’m not betting against the possibility for this year. On the other hand, last winter was, well, last winter. We barely glimpsed bare ground for at least six weeks. This winter the snow sometimes arrived with great fanfare and in great abundance, but it always departed before anyone got sick of it.

My snow shovel got what may have been its last workout of the season. It wasn’t an arduous one. The winter lights are still twined around the railing, but it’s been two weeks since I had them on. When there’s still light in the sky at seven p.m., there’s no need to keep the dark at bay.

Earlier in the month, soccer players returned to this field. Trav woos at them. If he weren’t on leash, he’d be scrambling for loose balls — of which there are usually at least a dozen in evidence. Once in a while one gets left behind in the woods. We think those are fair game.

No one was playing today.

Late afternoon shadows do wonderful things to this field. So does a dusting of snow.

The fire lane seems to go on forever, though I know it stops before the county airport.

The monochromatic days of winter are passing. Crocuses and daffodils have been blooming for a while, along with the dandelions, and I’ve even seen some forsythia: yellow season is arriving early. Still, in the woods only the pines are green, along with the brambles and the moss. The deciduous trees are still playing it close to the chest.

Trav remains gray and white all year-round. In the right light I see the reddish highlights in his coat.

March often seems like such a long month, but this March has blown by all too fast. Nevertheless, my income taxes are filed and Malvina Forester has passed inspection, so I think I’m ready for April.

Posted in home, outdoors | Tagged Facebook, off-season, snow, spring, Travvy, weather, winter | 15 Comments

3 Quotes, 3 Days: Day 3

Posted on March 8, 2016 by Susanna J. Sturgis

It’s actually Day 4 because somehow I missed Day 3, but here goes anyway. It’s International Women’s Day, after all, and I just saw Suffragette at the Vineyard Haven library.

For more about the 3 Quotes, 3 Days challenge, see Day 1.

When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.

Adrienne Rich, “Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying”

“Women and Honor” is a sacred text to me. At the opening night of the first writers’ workshop I ever attended — the 1984 Feminist Women’s Writing Workshop, held in Aurora, New York — we listened to a tape of Rich reading it.

I’d already read it several times. My copy of Rich’s On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966–1978, which includes it, has “May 1981” scribbled inside the front cover. But hearing Rich read her own words, as 18 women came together to focus on writing, our writing, and each other — this was powerful.

This is why I write. This is why I try to speak my truth. This is why I get so impatient when women with so much truth to tell hold back for fear of being wrong or giving offense.

Even though at every step of the way I know why we hold back.

Posted in writing | Tagged Adrienne Rich, blogging, feminism | 3 Comments

3 Quotes, 3 Days: Day 2

Posted on March 6, 2016 by Susanna J. Sturgis

For more about the 3 Quotes, 3 Days challenge, see Day 1.

When I came to Martha’s Vineyard in 1985, part of me thought I was taking a year off to work on a novel. I never finished that novel, but it changed the course of my life. Its working title was Coming Around. This was going to be its epigraph:

To go again where you have gone: Increase. To go backwards: Danger. Better to come round.

Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home

When I started Coming Around, I was living in Washington, D.C., and beginning to find my way as a writer, encouraged at every step by the feminist women in print movement swirling around me. I reviewed occasionally for the local gay paper and for off our backs. I was the book buyer for Lammas, D.C.’s feminist bookstore — talk about dream jobs, right? Twice a year, usually in mid-spring and late summer, I’d run back to my home state, Massachusetts, and spend some time recharging at my father’s camp on Tisbury Great Pond. I thought of myself as a city girl.

This character, Jamie, had been slipping in and out of my head for several years. We had a few things in common, Jamie and I, not least a family connection to Martha’s Vineyard and a horsey upbringing. She was a far more accomplished horsewoman than I, but she too had left the horse world behind. As I recall, she was now the art director for an independent or maybe university press in western Massachusetts.

Then her aunt Laura — not a blood aunt but a close family friend — called her out of the blue and asked her to come manage her small horse farm on Martha’s Vineyard. Jamie immediately throws her previously placid life into turmoil by saying yes.

She put the idea of moving to Martha’s Vineyard into my head. While walking on South Beach in early September 1984, I picked up a bit of wampum and put it in an amulet bag a friend had crocheted for me. That sealed my fate, though it was a few months before I knew it.

I arrived on Martha’s Vineyard on changeover weekend 1985 — for a year, mind you.

I wrote a lot that year, but it wasn’t on Coming Around. I continued to write essays and reviews for the feminist and gay press. I worked on a lengthy memoir trying to make sense of my life. What I wrote about Martha’s Vineyard was mostly poetry, and in traditional forms. The poems were like snapshots, my attempt to take in the place in which I found myself. By 1988 I was working part-time for and contributing regularly to the Martha’s Vineyard Times.

I’d been here almost a decade before I began to think that I might know enough to write a novel set on Martha’s Vineyard. For sure I didn’t know enough when I got here.

Throughout my D.C. years my horsegirl youth was locked firmly in the past, though, true, I considered my blue Peugeot bicycle my “urban horse” and I still have a D.C. NOW T-shirt that says “Urban Cowdyke” on it. Jamie might have come to the Vineyard to manage a horse farm, but not me. Then in the early 1990s a friend of mine introduced me to a friend of hers who, as it turned out, had an extra horse who needed occasional exercise.

So once again I came around to where I had gone. I don’t think I’ve gone backwards, but I’m not entirely sure. Le Guin’s words have never been far from my mind, and that’s why they’re quote #2 in my 3 Quotes, 3 Days challenge. Maybe someday I’ll get to use them for an epigraph.

Posted in musing, writing | Tagged feminism, horses, Lammas Bookstore, Martha's Vineyard Times, science fiction, Washington DC, writing | 1 Comment

3 Quotes, 3 Days: Day 1

Posted on March 5, 2016 by Susanna J. Sturgis

My favorite blogs open windows into the lives of other people, especially other women, other creative types, and people in other places. The blogger of The Glass Bangle fits all three categories: she’s a poet and writer who lives in South India. She just nominated me for the “3 Days, 3 Quotes” challenge, and I’m happy to oblige.

Well, OK, first I panicked because not a single quote came to mind, then a moment later my mind was so flooded with possibilities that I couldn’t pick one.

Then my hand reached for A Muriel Rukeyser Reader on my poetry shelf. Rukeyser’s poems are deep and demanding and beautiful. The lines I’ve decided to quote will be familiar to many, especially feminists of the second wave, but they remain fresh — and challenging. They also explain why I love reading blogs.

What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?

The world would split open

from “Kathe Kollwitz”

The universe is made of stories,

not of atoms.

from “The Speed of Darkness”

For more about Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980), check this out.

Posted in writing | Tagged blogging, feminism, poetry | 3 Comments

Post-Primary Day

Posted on March 2, 2016 by Susanna J. Sturgis

On our morning walks, Travvy and I usually head toward the state forest, via Pine Hill, Halcyon Way, or the Dr. Fisher Road. Yesterday we struck out in the opposite direction, across the Island Farms subdivision to State Road and the Public Safety Building, where my town votes.

Once we got there, I waved at the woman holding a Sanders poster out front, someone I’ve known for a long time but never well. Trav wooed vigorously at every vehicle that drove into the parking lot. His woo turned to a screech after I looped his leash around a sturdy oak, reattached him to it, and headed for the front door of the Public Safety Building. Trav does not being left behind, but he stops protesting once I’m out of sight.

Front entrance, Public Safety Building

Lo and behold, there was a line of voters waiting to check in. Not a long line, but a line nonetheless. As the poll worker in charge of L–Z located my name on the voter rolls, I noted that almost all the voting booths were occupied. Again, we’re not talking a large number, maybe eight or ten, and since the primary ballot is much simpler than the one we typically face in a general election, or even a town election, it wasn’t taking anyone long to vote.

I’m unenrolled, but, as usual, I requested the Democratic ballot. We vote on paper in West Tisbury. The Democratic ballot was dark pink. The Republican was blue. Evidently someone at the State House has a sense of humor.

The ballot included not only the Democratic candidates for president but also a slate for the Democratic Town Committee. I made my mark after Hillary Clinton’s name, then paused, wondering if I should vote for town committee members since I’m not really a Democrat and I never go to their meetings. I recognized most of the names. What the hell, I thought, and voted for the ones I like best.

Constable Tim Maley hands voter an “I Voted” sticker.

Waiting to check out

At the next table, the L–Z poll worker checked me off. Is this to make sure that everyone who enters the room leaves it, or that no ballot gets left behind? I then lined my ballot up facedown with the slot, and the constable cranked it into the ballot box. I stuck an “I Voted” sticker on my fleece vest and headed out into the bright sunshine.

Trav waits for me, tied to a tree.

I knew most of the poll workers and recognized some of the voters. This is one reason I became a much more regular voter after I moved to Martha’s Vineyard. After I’d been around for two or three years, when I went to the polls I’d nearly always see people I knew. The poll worker would be turning to the S pages before I said my name.

At the end of the day, I drove into Vineyard Haven to see Spotlight for the second time. Spotlight, which just won the Academy Award for Best Picture, is about the Boston Globe’s Spotlight team’s exposure of child sexual abuse and its coverup by the Roman Catholic Church. It’s a phenomenal movie, which is why I wanted to see it again, and seeing it on primary election night put all the hoop-de-do in perspective.

Because this for me is what politics is really about: ferreting out wrongs and righting them, comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. Politicians and electoral politics had nothing to do with it. Boston then and forever is a one-party town. (That party, by the way, is Democratic.) Outsiders were instrumental in breaking the scandal, and in prompting the insiders to act. Those outsiders were neither billionaires nor U.S. senators.

I drove home invigorated, intending to get some work done. Ha! No way. After checking email I immediately went hunting for election returns. The Boston Globe‘s website, Boston.com, had a handy-dandy page dedicated to the Democratic primary, with Clinton’s and Sanders’s totals updated as precincts across the commonwealth reported in and a drop-down featuring returns from every town. With almost half the precincts reporting, Clinton led by a very few percentage points. It looked close. Nothing had been heard yet from any of the Vineyard towns. Hand-counting paper ballots takes a while.

Well, of course I had to report this up-to-the-minute info on Facebook, and equally of course, once I was on Facebook I couldn’t get off. Every few minutes I consulted the Boston.com page. The percentage of precincts reporting went steadily up; Clinton’s lead kept slipping, a few tenths of a percentage point at a time.

Well, Clinton carried Massachusetts but not by much. On the Vineyard, turnout was impressive for a primary: the average was 47%, compared to 13% in 2012 (the Dem primary was not too exciting that year), and West Tisbury topped the list at 54%. Sanders and Trump won their respective primaries handily, with Sanders’s margin in the up-island towns noticeably bigger than it was down-island. According to the Martha’s Vineyard Times, as of late Tuesday night, 4,899 Democratic votes had been cast, almost four times more than the 1,266 Republican votes.

No matter who they voted for, most of my Democratic-leaning friends are appalled by Trump and more than a little freaked to be living on the same island as so many of his supporters. For me, the simultaneous Vineyard victories of Sanders and Trump underscore their similarities: both are riding on strong anti-establishment feeling in their respective parties, and both have strong ideas with no practical plan for implementing them. Sanders’s supporters seem to be generally more affluent and better educated than Trump’s.

They may not see it this way, but their respective supporters might count their blessings if their man doesn’t become president. No one turns on a hero faster than devotees who expected the moon and didn’t get it.

Posted in public life | Tagged community, election 2016, Facebook, politics, Travvy, West Tisbury | 2 Comments