This has of been a very strange and trying time for us on an off-shore island, as it has been for everyone else throughout the world. Like you, we try to stay safe and look out for our neighbors, and soldier on as best we can to live as normally as possible. The off-season is always a very busy time of year for us. It is the time when we can enjoy life on Nantucket to its fullest, we also take the opportunity to catch up on the endless projects that are part and parcel of the antiques trade: hunting and foraging, restorations, research, and reams of paperwork! Some paperwork is dull and laborious and just needs to be done. Other paperwork, namely creative writing, is much harder work, but much, much more fun and rewording.
I have been writing fiction and non-fiction pieces for many years. Certainly when I was still working in evolutionary biology I seemed to be writing one paper after another (there is a massive monograph on The Biological Effects of Sea Ice in the library of the Institute of Marine Science of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks). And there was one winter on Nantucket that I supported myself just by freelance writing. For the last several years I have been writing a series of Antiques Snippets and biographical features for Nantucket’s own Yesterday’s Island, and this year started writing topical articles for the Nantucket Historical Association’s publication Historic Nantucket, their online Nantucket University, and their periodic newsletters. It has been great fun, and very satisfying, although it does feel odd having to race against a deadline once again.
On this Memorial Day Weekend, we thought you might be missing Nantucket and would enjoy a little inside peak. So this week we are sharing an article written for the 50th Anniversary of Yesterday’s Island beginning publication on Nantucket. The paper is published by the Daubs family, some of the very first people I met when I first came to the island in the late 1970s. Stepping back for a glimpse of what it was like living and growing up on Nantucket in 1970, I went for a chat with my friend Harvey Young. You can read the article by clicking on the link here.
